Chocolate Salted Caramel Tarts

I had a massive chocolate craving last week, which I decided to satiate with these salted caramel tarts. I’d picked up this really nice Valrhona 70% dark chocolate  (with little cocoa nibs in it) at Changi Duty Free in Singapore and I felt guilty not putting it to some good culinary use. I’d devoured alost a third of it (35g, in fact), but there was just enough left to make a batch of tarts.

I’ve also written out a recipe for a tropic-friendly pastry that works well with tarts. Pastry dough is usually a pain to make in warm climates, because good pastry counts on butter staying frozen as it gets cut into smaller and smaller bits into the flour. If it all melts, you end up with an overtly soft dough that will eventually bake way too hard. This recipe uses almonds and eggs to lighten the consistency of the dough, and you can actually use your hands to beat it into fluffiness.

The recipe is based on one that I came across in an episode of Masterchef Australia’s masterclasses with the pastry chef Vincent Gadan. I’ve adapted it to use whole almonds and 50% whole wheat flour. The original recipe used almond flour, but since that isn’t very easy (or economical) to come by here, I’ve tweaked it a bit to let you make your own almond flour. Grinding almonds to dust in a dry grinder is extremely tedious, because the heat and friction eventually brings out the oil from the almonds and causes the flour to clump up and get quite damp. I solved this by pairing the chopped up almonds with actual flour, which cuts the mix in the just the right way to let the almonds powder as fine as your machine can make them.

Once the dough is rested, divided, rolled and gently laid in the tart tins, make sure you freeze it for a few hours at least. The shock of heat from freezing cold to the heat of the oven is crucial in creating a flaky crumb. I blind bake the pastry crusts by cutting little squares of tin foil and sitting them inside the frozen tartshells, with dried chickpeas as baking weights.

Relatively, the pastry is the most complicated part of the recipe. Caramel is easy. It quite literally involves burning sugar till it becomes caramel. You have to be careful though; I made the mistake of using a heavy bottomed pan and ended up burning the first batch of caramel. I usually use a thin non stick pan. Once the caramel starts to darken, it also starts to absorb heat faster, accelerating the burning process. I usually like my caramel extra dark and bitter, but the bitterness would compete with the chocolate in a way that would thoroughly undermine it. So you want the colour to be a nice golden brown, almost the colour of good honey.  Let the caramel cool just a bit before you add the cream, or it’ll protest madly with a lot of steam and spitting. You shouldn’t wait too long though, or the caramel will harden and you’ll have a hard time mixing it up evenly with the cream and butter.

The ganache is actually the easiest part of the process. I love making ganche because it transforms bars of chocolate into this sinuous concoction that is glossy and dark and makes the whole house smell like chocolate. Using a heavy bottomed saucepan would be a good idea in this case, because the heat it retains would help melt the chocolate with the cream faster, especially if it is cold from the fridge.

Even though this is a three part recipe, it’s actually quite a simple exercise. The caramel and ganache can both be prepared in about thirty minutes and only require a little mise-en-scène of weighing out sugar, butter, cream and chocolate, making it the perfect weekend experiment.

The recipe below should yield about six tarts worth of caramel and ganache. Depending on how you roll your pastry dough, the dough recipe should yield between six to eight tart shells.