CHEF: This is a very classic tradition right now
with the strawberries.
This beautiful lineup, this beautiful pattern
of the strawberries on the tart.
I think your fruit tarts should have lots of fruits.
This is where all the flavors, all the juiciness
is going to come from.
I want the strawberry to be the star of the top.
I've worked for many, many, years in fine dining
restaurant, doing this beautiful geometrical deconstructed
dishes, abstract dishes that were very playful on the plate.
And I felt very lucky to have servers actually
able to take all of my dishes, bring it to the table,
and tell all the stories to the diners.
Working in the bakery is a lot different.
I always tell people that my pastries are
like a silent film, and you just walk by every day,
and they have to be impactful.
As soon as you look at it, they have to look good.
They have to be attractive.
You have to be seduced by it.
And the first contact you have with the food
is always a visual contact.
You have no one, when you walk in the bakery,
to tell you the full stories.
Think about it.
You go to a bakery, you just have a few seconds,
a few minutes interaction with the person that helps you.
It's really hard to talk about all the pastries.
So presentation is something very important for me.
The food has to look appetizing, the food has to look beautiful,
and now I'm going to show you how
we can easily make this happen.
Every time I do a fruit tart, something
that is-- that looks beautiful, I
want to preserve it for as long as we can.
Of course, we leave it in a pastry case,
so with time it always dries out a little bit.
So this little layer of glaze will help preserve and make
your fruits look beautiful.
So essentially, three ingredients,
and a simple recipe, water, sugar, and pectin.
What's for this recipe, we use NH pectin.
NH is a very specific pectin that you can easily
find online.
It's thermo-reversible pectin, meaning
that you can heat it up and let it cool and heat it up again
and let it cool as many times as you wish.
We're going to start with the water in a saucepan,
and we're going to add half of the sugar.
Once it comes to a boil, we're going to put it to a simmer.
In the meantime, I'm going to mix the pectin what the sugar.
So we mix the pectin with the sugar to make sure
that everything is fully dissolved.
So what a pectin will do in here is
that it will help jellify and stabilize the syrup.
So this glaze works very well on fruits when they cut,
but also you can use it to glaze a cake.
This one is actually not flavor, but you can always flavor it.
Feel free to add some lemon zest, a little bit of mint,
a little bit of vanilla.
Anything you wish to add to flavor of the syrup
should be a good match with the fruits you're walking with.
This glaze will last you for quite some time.
You can't easily keep it for a week or two in the fridge.
You can also substitute some other water
with some fruit puree, such as raspberry, for instance,
and you have beautiful pink glaze that
is flavored with raspberries.
So once the water and sugar comes to a boil,
we're going to sprinkle this sugar and pectin into it
while whisking.
Little by little, you won't dump everything at once,
want to make sure everything is fully dissolved.
Once we're done adding the sugar and the pectin,
we're going to bring it to a boil.
And for this, the more you boil it, the more you reduce it.
And with this recipe, it's just the right ratio,
so if you bring into a bowl just for a few seconds,
it will be set properly.
If you reduce in that pan just a little bit too long,
you might have something very thick.
And if you have something very thick,
you can always add a little bit of water and microwave it.
Once this is done, we're just putting this into a container.
And we're going to cover it and put it in the fridge.
For a pastry chef, preparation is everything.
So before we start assembling everything,
before you start a recipe, make sure you have
everything you need to do so.
We're now going to assemble the strawberry tart,
and that we have our strawberry jam, our pastry cream,
our glaze that is ready, we have our fruits,
and now we're ready to finish everything.
Always select the fruits when they are the best.
Summertime is great for strawberries, raspberries,
all the kind of berries, peaches, apricots.
In the wintertime, I will mostly use apples, pears,
and sometimes quince.
Now we're going to start the build of our tart.
So I will start with the jam on the bottom.
And I like to put the jam on the bottom
because it's a little softer.
So we have the tart shelf that is really crispy.
And we'll just pipe a little bit of jam
in a circle on the bottom of the tart shell.
And this is a little bit heavier than pastry cream,
so here you have these on the bottom,
and then pastry cream on top.
And for this, you'd have to be precise.
I like having everything ready in piping bags.
It's easier, it's quicker to use.
But you can also use just a spoon,
and spread it on the bottom of the tart shell.
I will start from the outside.
I will pipe as high as I can, as close as possible
to the edge of the tart.
And I'll go in a circle towards the center.
So you want to fill it as much as you can.
You don't want any gaps.
And then we're going to finish off with fresh fruits.
So the fruit selection is very important.
Always choose right fruits.
When I choose my peaches, for instance,
I was like to smell it first to see
if there's a nice aroma, a nice flavor of peach.
And I always will always push the stem
that's left on the peach.
If I can easily push it off, it means that the fruit is ripe.
If it's still stuck on the peach,
it means that the fruit is not right.
I also like to feel the fruits, exert a little of pressure
with my fingers to see if it's tender or if it's soft,
or if it's hard.
If it's nice and soft and you feel
the juiciness, the plumpiness of the fruit,
you have a good chance of getting good fruit.
We're going to start with the strawberries.
And when I'm in the kitchen, I always
look at the food, even the food I eat,
and then I always smell it before I eat it.
And it should smell fruity.
It should smell fresh.
It should smell like a good aroma of strawberry.
Then we'll just take off the stem.
Very important for pastry chef, size and uniformity
of the fruit to make a beautiful tart.
When you buy a box of strawberries,
look for the one that has the same size.
If not, I will always arrange them by size
and placed the larger one on the outside of the tart
and the smaller one toward the center.
So it's very important to remove the leaves
from the strawberries.
I never really liked anything that was not edibles, put it
on my plate or on my food.
I'm removing the little leaf with a paring knife,
and what we're looking for is to remove as little as possible.
One of my first job and one of my co-worker
was getting the leaves of the strawberries,
and he was chopping a good third of the strawberries.
And when my chef found out, he actually
went, pick up the trash, pull everything, and show him
how much he was wasting.
And I was standing right next to him at this time,
and I will always remember this because it's true.
You just had to use the tip of the knife,
put it right underneath the leaf, and pull it off,
and you shouldn't waste any of the strawberry.
A paring knife is very practical and very easy
to remove the little leafs.
That's what I usually use in kitchen, make
sure it's the appropriate size.
This one has a short blade.
It's very easy to handle.
So you can use pretty much any foods
your like to make a fruit tart.
There's a lot of fruits that are a little trickier to work with,
like citrus.
I personally love a good orange tart or a grapefruit tart,
but when you cut the segments, it can actually get pretty wet.
So the good trick for this is that I will do it ahead of time
and place it on a sheet tray with some paper
towel on the bottom, to just remove,
to release the excess of juice that we got from the fruit.
And then, once they're a little bit dry,
I'll place it on the tart, and I will finish it
with a little glaze.
I think a fruit tart should have lots of fruits.
Of course, don't be afraid to put as much as you want,
as much as you can, and be generous with the fruits.
This is where all the flavors, all the juiciness kind of
come from, from your fresh fruits.
So we're going to start with the larger-size strawberries I'm
going to place on the outside.
And the reason why is that I want
a beautiful consistent design.
Think about the tart shell as a canvas.
So it's a blank plate, and that's your drawing board.
That's what you are going to use to make something beautiful.
So there's many, many ways you can decorate a fruit
tart using the same fruits.
So by just cutting it differently, for this,
I like to cut them in half because they
are the right size.
If they're a little bit smaller, during the summer
I get a lot of strawberries from the farm,
I like to keep them whole.
Just wash them, clean them well, and then dry them a little bit.
Remove the little leaf, and just pile them
up as high as you can.
It's hard when the strawberries are
too small to actually cut them.
So it's always better to keep them whole.
Or you can also, if you have big strawberries,
slice them and fan them out on top of your tart.
That can be something beautiful as well.
And a good thing with the strawberry
is that you can still move them around and adjust them.
So the most important for me is to create
this beautiful pattern, this beautiful lineup
of the strawberries on the tart.
And as I go towards the center of the tart,
I'm going to choose the smallest strawberries.
This is a very classic presentation
right now with the strawberries.
You can try to be a little more creative, a little bit more
adventurous, and cut the strawberries differently.
And when I build my strawberry tart,
I like to look at it from different angle.
Of course, from the top to see the pattern, but also
from the side to see the height.
So the height is very important.
We have the tart shell.
I really wanted a strawberry to stand out.
I really want the strawberry to come out of the top.
I don't want the tart, the tart shell to be too thick.
I don't want the strawberries to be inside.
I want the strawberry to be the star of the tart.
And now the last touch on our strawberry tart,
we're going to glaze.
So before you glaze, make sure that the glaze actually
did right.
Temperature, so should be warm, a little bit
warmer than your body temperature.
And if the fruit is just being warm,
as well, it should easily fall off the brush.
So one of the biggest mistake that people do was in the past,
is that either it's too hot and you risk to damage your fruit,
or it's too thick.
So if it's too thick you need to add a little bit of water.
If it's too thick, it will just form this like very thick jelly
on top of the fruits, and will not be pleasant to eat.
So I usually dip my brush, dab it a little bit
on the side of the bowl.
So I don't want too much, and I'm going to go over the fruits
and brush it very quickly.
And you should see the glaze draping the fruit.
So the glaze should be like less than a millimeter
thick, just enough to make the fruit glossy.
It's almost like painting, right?
You have a brush.
You want to put a very thin, delicate layer on the fruit
to make it beautiful and shiny.
And I always start from the outside.
Sometimes I'll use the corner of the brush,
not the whole width of the brush,
but just the corner of the brush.
Go from the bottom, push it, and lift it up.
That's almost like nail polish.
I usually do one fruit at a time to make sure
that I don't put glaze all over the other fruits.
I want to start from the outside and go towards the center,
so I don't go back over the fruits I already glazed.
And be careful when you do this, not
to move the fruits that's set in the cream.
So you don't want to move them too much.
You just want this thin layer of glaze over the fruit.
Do you see now, our tart is looking beautiful and shiny,
very glossy.
Before was just still pretty, but a little bit matte.
And now we have a shiny and beautiful tart.
So I'm getting just the cut face of the strawberries.
I don't want go to the backside.
There's no need.
I just want to protect whatever we cut.
So this is pretty much finished.
What I like to do is always to go back with the jam.
So with my piping bag, and go in between the strawberries.
So this will add a little bit of color.
So you don't have to put too much, just
to fill some of the gap.
And we'll make our tart--
it will just add a little bit of dimension,
and add some color to our tart.
Look at this.
This is beautiful.
Our tart is finally finished.
We've worked really hard for it.
There's a few components, and it's
a great way of displaying the fresh fruit in the summers,
and I'm sure you're going to make a lot of people happy.