Now that autumn is finally here, we have a classic French recipe to share with you: vegan tarte tatin. This dish marries up apples, autumn spices and brandy and presents them on a deliciously flaky pastry crust.
This dish is so wonderful because you get that amazing apple pie experience without all the difficult and intricate pastry work that sometimes comes with making an actual pie. You just bathe the apples in some olive oil, maple syrup and spices, whack a sheet of puff pastry on the top of the pan and stick it in the oven for 30 minutes… Turn it upside down and you have a rich autumn dessert that you won’t be able to stop eating! A lot of you will be thinking that it might have been difficult to ‘veganise’ a dish that traditionally involves apples cooked in butter and is served on puff pastry (which is traditionally butter and flour). Firstly, most puff pastry that you find in the supermarkets (like Jus-Rol or Pepperidge Farm*) is actually vegan as they replace butter with vegetable oils to reduce costs. Ironically, vegans get a lot of criticism for finding imaginative alternatives to ‘old school’ cooking, but a lot of the time most store-bought processed versions of cakes and sweets deviate even more from the original recipe! To make the rest of the recipe vegan I substituted sugar for maple syrup and butter for olive oil. Because butter typically brings richness, I decided that I needed to be on my ‘A’ game for this recipe, so I added in some autumnal spices, vanilla and brandy, just to give it an extra kick. The trick with this recipe is getting the fruit to the point that, by the time you take the tart out of the oven, the fruit holds together but is right on the cusp of breaking up. Ideally, you should be able to cut through the apples with a spoon very easily. We went for a very dark caramelisation on the fruit, so our version is not massively sweet as the sugar loses its sweetness when the caramel is darker. If you want a sweeter tart you could achieve this by not letting the sugar turn as brown (4th step) which would also result in a tart that was a lot lighter in colour. However dark your finished product, this is amazing as an after dinner autumn dessert and perfectly respectable as an afternoon snack to have with coffee. Enjoy!
