[musical tones]
[door shuts]
[contemplative music]
Action!
Frederick, we’re not ready.
[Frederick sings]
Welcome to the latest installment
of Buford and Sons, featuring me,
Bill Buford, our cinematographer, whom you’ll never see,
George Buford, and our director,
making a sartorial debut of his new silk pajamas,
Frederick Buford.
What this, oh, it’s nothing.
Today, we are making French apple pie,
otherwise known as tarte de pomme,
which is different from American apple pie
in small respects.
The fruit is less sweetened, if sweetened at all,
and it resides upon a bed of applesauce.
And in a big way, mainly the pastry,
which is a French pastry, a pate brisee, in this case,
one of those butter pastries that are a little tricky
to make that I’ve always had difficulty with
until I went to a cooking school
and learned some basic tricks–
[Frederick] We get it, you went to a cooking school.
[broadcast signal]
So what we have here is the fruit of the end of summer,
the beginning of fall.
And all this fruit can actually go with the pastry
that we’re going to make.
The pastry’s so crispy and buttery and sweet
that the only thing you need is a little bit
of cooked fruit and it’s a beautiful dish.
Here we have the end of the plums.
Plum in the French pastry is fantastic,
very simple by itself.
We have the end of the season peaches, ditto.
We have the beginning of the next season quince,
which is a fabulous fruit which is part pear, part apple.
Very tricky to work with, but a beautifully fragrant fruit.
And then, of course, we have our apples,
which is gonna be the heart of what we’re preparing today,
our French apple pie.
[silly music]
Need five apples.
We’re making a lot of applesauce today.
[inaudible]
These are our pastry ingredients, flour, butter,
sugar, salt, water, egg yolk.
Biggest one, flour, 250 grams.
The next biggest, butter, exactly half, 125 grams.
Sugar, 25 grams, salt, five grams, water, 50 liters,
50 milliliters, and the egg yolk.
This is what makes the dish work.
It’s the combination of all these other ingredients,
which you can see in any kind of dough, even a pasta,
except for the butter.
Half of it is butter.
That’s what makes it tricky, that’s what makes it wonderful.
The key to making the pastry
is to keep all your ingredients as cold as possible.
Because if you heat up and it’s creating gluten.
Gluten and fat is just absolutely disgusting.
So I’ve just sifted my flour
and then I create a well where we’re gonna add sugar.
I’m gonna add my salt to the well.
I’m gonna mix them together.
No, no, no, no, no! [laughs]
Sorry, sorry, sorry. [laughs]
[Bill] Leave my little fountain alone.
[Frederick] Sorry if I messed up your well.
Next, I’m going to add our water element.
We’re about to add an egg yolk and the idea
is to dissolve the salt and the sugar in the water,
because it ends up crystallizing the egg yolk
if you don’t dissolve it.
And next we add the egg yolk.
But this is a very basic batter preparation.
The difference is what comes next.
Quarter of a pound of butter.
No, almost a half pound of butter.
A lot of butter.
The fact is that butter will melt as you cook.
And if it’s not perfectly amalgamated by the end,
it will be okay.
It won’t be a beautiful result if you work it too much
and you knead it too much and you get it hot
or if your son suddenly sticks his warm fingers
into your otherwise–
[George] Frederick, stop!
[Frederick] Sorry, I’m sorry, I, it’s tempting!
[Bill] These are what’re called the dry pastries.
Every bit of moisture is being incorporated into the dough.
And then, you don’t want to knead it,
but you’re allowed to do one smush.
Now I can shape it into a circle.
Next, I put it in a plastic bag
and we let this rest in the refrigerator
for at least half an hour.
And then we prepare the other elements in our dish.
[Frederick] Why are your shoes so shiny?
[Bill] They’re just shiny.
Those are some shiny shoes.
Those are very shiny shoes.
Do you guys think those are abnormally shiny shoes?
[Bill] They’re kitchen clogs, they’re shiny,
shiny kitchen clogs.
[Frederick] Oh, they’re covered in butter.
The first thing we do while our pastry rests
in the fridge is we’re gonna make our applesauce.
Three medium-sized apples.
They can even be mixed, like these are.
These just happened to be what I’ve got.
You peel them, you core them
and we’ve put them in acidified water,
which is just water with lemon, so they don’t brown.
And now I’m going to chop them up rough and quick.
[knife bangs]
Next I’m taking my chopped up apples,
which I will add a little sugar, and I toss it.
Next, I add better to my warm saute pan.
I add my apples, get it goin’.
Add my cinnamon stick.
In 10 minutes, the saute pan covered,
it will be apple sauce.
Then we will scrape the apple sauce into a strainer
and let all the liquid drip out slowly, slowly, slowly,
’cause we want it as dry as possible.
And that’s gonna be the base of our tart.
As it happens, I made some applesauce beforehand
and let it drain.
It drained for about two hours
and quite a bit of liquid came out.
What you’re left with at the end is kind of, yeah,
it might be applesauce that you might recognize
from jars of the stuff, but it’s also just this nice,
quite dry paste.
That’s gonna be the bottom of our apple tart.
Next we prepare our tart tin, our flan, with butter.
We add some flour, shake it around.
Next, we put this in the freezer for two minutes
and then take it out and give it another flour dusting.
Oh, and it as it happens.
[Frederick] And as it happens.
I happen to have one that I prepared earlier,
which is in need of another dusting.
Look at that!
Wow, isn’t that convenient?
And now I give this one a second dusting
and you have this wonderful nonstick surface
we’ll be able to put our buttery pastry on top of.
And now our pastry having rested in the refridge
for at least half an hour, and in this case about an hour,
we’re going to roll it out and hope
that it doesn’t fall apart too much.
What you’re seeing is the fragility
of a dough that’s 50% butter.
And you can see the outlines of the butter in the dough.
And it’s a tiny bit warm.
It might be too warm to roll out properly,
but I’m gonna give it a try.
It wasn’t an ideal rollout, but not entirely a disaster.
And then we don’t wanna work this very hard.
We lost our rim, which is a little unfortunate,
but I think we can make that work, too.
If I can do this.
Again, not ideal, but as I said, it’s butter.
It will reform itself when it cooks.
Poke some holes in it so that the pastry bottom
doesn’t rise up and liftoff during the heating.
This is actually a fish boner, but it works.
[Frederick] You’re really messing this up.
Yeah, it got a little soft.
I’m actually gonna just do this a little kind of fast,
’cause it’s got a little soft on me.
And then when I finish this,
it may not be the most gorgeous tart we’ve seen.
I’ve put it in the fridge again,
let it rest for at least 30 minutes.
And finally, we prepare our apples for our tart.
I’ve skinned the apples, I’ve cored the apples,
I’ve cut them in half and now I’m gonna slice them
as thinly as possible and build a little circle
inside the rims of the tart.
Next we assemble the tart.
This is our pastry.
No one could accuse it of being a work of beauty,
but I think it’s nevertheless gonna be perfectly delicious.
We start first with our now quite dry, quite thick,
little cinnamon in there, apple sauce.
Next, our apples!
Start here, try to get pretty close to the same shape.
[Frederick] I think you’re overestimating
how many apples you have.
That might be, I might have to cut some more.
This is ready.
It can go straight into the oven.
But I do like to add a little bit of butter at the end
and sprinkle with it a little bit of sugar.
There’s no added sugar to the apples.
At the very end, it’ll come out
and we will paint it with some heated up apricot jam,
which is the French chefs’ trick for all tarts and pies.
Just a little apricot jam at the end
gives it that little. [imitates chewing]
You know, it gives it that little–
[both imitate chewing]
He’s not showing you this,
but usually, when he makes it himself,
he puts a piece of butter under every apple.
[Bill laughs]
We leave it in there about 30 minutes.
The temperature is 200 degrees centigrade,
and then we’ll have dessert.
[upbeat piano music]
So after 40 minutes in the oven, we have our pie.
You can’t smell it, but it smells beautiful.
It smells, it smells of October.
It smells of apples.
It’s pie, it’s just…
[upbeat music] Jessica’s Wine Pairing.
[laughs]
Don’t look so sad.
Well, we didn’t have any like hype music or–
[all scream]
[laughs]
So Jessica, we have our first apple pie
of the fall, a tarte fine du pomme.
[Frederick imitates Bill]
That, exactly what he said.
What do you drink with it?
Apple juice, cider?
Better, something sweet.
If you have a dessert, you need a wine at least
as sweet as the dessert,
the tarte du fine aux pomme, will be perfect with Sauternes.
Plastic with a classic.
That looks deep and aged and–
It is, it’s older than the boys.
I was looking at it. Really?
It’s 2003, so it’s older than George and Frederick.
It’s an expensive treat,
but you can share it, and you only need a little bit.
So I bet when you smell this,
you’re gonna think of apple pie.
Doesn’t that smell delicious?
Oh, wow.
Very delicious, smells like pastry, smells like caramel,
smells like Brown sugar.
Forget the apple pie.
[Both] Cheers!
[speaking French]
[Frederick] You’re weird, why?
[hums]
Well done!
It’s not too sweet. I like that.
[Bill] If we ever have people over for dinner again,
it’d be such a hit.
