Carla Makes a Salted Caramel-Chocolate Tart | From the Test Kitchen | Bon Appétit

BBD, Alright guys, I really have a lot of work ahead of me today, first of all, I'm going to make your recipe clear and it's a baking recipe which is always a little intimidating even for me, but this is what I'm going to make savory.

caramel

chocolate

cake and one of the things that's incredibly exciting about it and what it's about is kind of the innovative use of salt in a dessert. Okay so I'm s

tart

ing with this

chocolate

bark and that's one of the three layers in the dessert there's a chocolate bark there's a

salted

caramel

filling and then on top of that there's a bittersweet chocolate ganache and on top of that there's flake salt, the part of chocolate comes from cocoa, this is unsweetened cocoa powder, this is sugar, so this salt that goes into the crust this is kosher salt and I wouldn't use flake salt in the dough because what we want here is for this salt to be disperse throughout the dough is one of the dry ingredients this is all-purpose flour because what By layering some of the dry ingredients with cocoa powder, you're losing some of that binding power that you have all-purpose, so it does let the dough be a little more crumbly, a little closer to the French pastry they would call a saw blade, oh stop, unfortunately it means gritty, you'll notice I'm working the butter in more than necessary for a flaky pastry.

I'm actually working this enough with my fingers, oh, it

makes

little explosions of powder, balls of cocoa powder to really work the butter. Even with a very fine texture we can talk about salt and desert. Salt and chocolate are very important to combine. The chocolate adapts very well to the flavors of the salt and brings out all the flavors of the chocolate. Salt does something else. which is that it tempers the butter fat, so if you try to make an un

salted

crust or cookie and you eat it, it's going to taste very one-dimensional, so I have a large egg yolk and three tablespoons of whole milk with a fork. nice because it keeps things pretty fluffy and lets everything happen.

I just prefer to use my hands. I feel like the fork has everything pretty spread out, but I feel like I can get a better feel here with my fingers, so I don't want to. Go crazy, but I'm working with it more than a normal dough and getting to the point where it stays together when you squeeze it. You have your plastic wrap. Look at your dough. I know it looks very brittle anyway. I'm making my little chocolate packet using the plastic wrap just squeeze it out and to press it into a disk, the rounder it is now the more and a half chance of making it round when you roll it out and also better for the frizz being kuroda, are we making the mass like me?

I was talking about before, this is a shorter puff pastry dough, you may feel like it's falling apart, falling apart, or cracking more than usual, don't worry, one of the great things about this dough is that you can patch it and put it all back together and then I was also reading about shortcrust pastry in preparation for this video, the way I look at it is the things that I don't know and that other people are better at than me. something that's just a reality because I'm surrounded by all these amazing people every day, but all of that is just an opportunity to discover something I don't know.

I've talked about how Chris Morocco's boss told me. Once on how to roll a dough, you like to turn it and giving it a quarter turn with each pass is a great way to avoid cracks. There will be times later when you might see some cracks and we're going to do the exact same thing. Same thing, so I'm going to use the dough to repair all those cracks, so what I want now is the way I do it. You could measure with a ruler, but I like to take the

tart

pan I'm going with - and just by glancing at it, the dough should be a couple of inches larger than the outside edge of this.

The normal way I like to do this is I roll the dough over the pin and then I lift it up and put it back down if we do that here this dough is - vi bleh, it's too sandy, it's too crumbly, it's not going to work, like this so what I'm going to do is pick up a little edge here and put a little bit of flour underneath and then I'm just going to slide this down. This will become a riser and then carefully lift the edges of the dough so that everything is contained in this.

Think of this as a little lifting platform and now I can lift it up without anything breaking and just lower it down. in the pan and then I can unfold it instead of having to lower it. I'm just rolling out the sides and you don't want to put too much pressure on there because that will just make the dough thin, but I need a little more. here because it's missing a link and then I'll keep my eyes peeled for any small cracks or thin spots. Taking this rolling pin again, I'm going to go over it and close up all this excess so it cuts away. but I'm going to attach the bottom with this fork and what that does is prevent the dough from jumping in the oven that they are going to fill again, it's not like the bottom of your cake has holes and caramelizes.

They will leak out, these will fill back up, but having a little place for the air to escape will prevent it from becoming a big rocky, bumpy surface, this will go away now and freeze until firm, so let's move on to the candy salted part of the salted caramel chocolate cake, so the cream of tartar, because it's an acidic ingredient, will prevent the sugar crystals from wanting to come back together and stay together, so that's the key when you make caramel, so I'm starting. over medium-low heat and I'll heat it up pretty gently at first until I'm 100% sure that all the sugar has dissolved and the way you can tell is it's obviously not going to have this whitish grainy appearance.

It will turn clear and thin and look like sugar syrup, but you don't want to rush it and it's totally fine and in fact, don't worry at all because you can stir during that step, so again if you pick up the heat now and do that too soon you are going to dissolve some of the sugar but not all of it and your candy will never caramelize properly this is almost clear totally clear now I have bubbles now I feel good now it's time to say goodbye to the candy stirring phase. I'm turning up the heat just a touch.

You know, the phase from white to light pale yellow is like forever and ever, but from that pale yellow to completely over. it's like two minutes so jump back in don't fall asleep on the candy guys you just have to watch it can be nice clear bubbles calming that's another thing I'm looking for and I'm relieved if there's some kind of foam or residue on the The top of those bubbles is a sign that the sugar is still crystallized and you're not going to have a caramel instead of being completely clear. This looks very, very, very pale, like watery honey, which means the caramelization process has begun.

Things are happening now. maple syrup color, but only the instructions on this are dark amber with wisps of smoke. I see a little net smoke vest, a little bit of smoke, all good, very careful now because this is incredibly hot and there is water in the butter and the water boiling at a much lower temperature is what's happening here. I'm adding the butter to the caramel and it foams up quite vigorously and then I'm going to stir this until I feel the butter melting which obviously happens incredibly quickly and then I add the cream back in the same sizzling and butter will continue and the salt It's OK now.

I want to stir this until it's completely dissolved and the foam subsides, so now that everything is dissolved, there are no lumps, okay, I have my raw frozen. Chocolate cake dough pierced with a fork, the next step is to blind bake this dough. Blind baking just means you're baking it with nothing, which is a misnomer because it has to be filled with cake weight and then, oh, they're really heavy. They are ball bearings. If you only have regular pie weights at home or dried beans or rice, that's totally fine. We found all these ball bearings in our old

kitchen

and someone had the idea to use them as pie weights and they are. awesome so those are there, the pie weights job is to prevent the crust from collapsing or puffing up during blind baking and this is cooked in two stages about halfway through.

I'm going to remove the ball bearings but for now I need to be on the boo ball bearings are heavy so now we're making the third and final layer of this cake is a bittersweet chocolate ganache so what I have here is It's called a double boiler and it's just boiling water under the bittersweet chocolate. It is important to double check that it does not exceed 70% cocoa. Doing so may cause the ganache to break and become oily. A little more salted butter and heavy cream, so I'm just stirring. This goes much faster than caramel, so it's fresh. so the butter is almost melted, all the other components of this dish have salt, the ganache does not and that's because on top of the ganache there will be a shower of flaky salt crystals, so that's where the chocolate and the salt will have its moments don't worry, I feel very good about this, so now that everything is melted and completely soft you just have to leave it at room temperature, don't put it in the refrigerator or anything, it will cool unevenly, okay , I want to check it. that blind baking pie crust is okay, so what I'm looking for and I can tell without moving this too much is that we're there, the edges of the crust are starting to look dry, the bottom of the crust is going to have still missing a little more, but now it's safe to take out the weights and another thing you want to make sure when lifting the cake weights is that the parchment paper or aluminum foil you used doesn't stick to the bottom and then accidentally lift the entire cake. while doing this going back in.

I have my cooled pie crust blind baked. It's important that the pie crust has time to cool, but it's okay that my caramel is the salted caramel that I made before it's still a little warm, oh my goodness, it looks so good it's a little runny, so it will be. when it's completely cool, but you can get an idea of ​​what the final texture will be if the caramel is too easy, what happens is when you cut a slice, the caramel comes out, the ganache roof sinks and it just flattens out, like this that was worth it, we wasted time, but that's how you get to be the best, you know what I mean, this is We're going to cool down now with the caramel in there before we add the ganache.

All the layers have to be cold, otherwise the chocolate would melt on contact and then that would not be what we want. It is no longer hot to the touch. That's all. the same temperature and it's in the cooled crust so now it's the fun part where we can do the kisses and the swirls so one of the things that Claire and I talked about was how to leave a little border around the edge so that I didn't see the caramel underneath but just using the back of a spoon or you like to make all these decorative swirls and the colder the ganache the longer they will hold oh la la I love them this is the last part of the chocolate cake with salted caramel, which is fleur de sel or any flake salt, actually fleur de sel is a salt from Brittany, so many verify me and they are very delicate, like fragments that sometimes form small pyramidal shapes. so this is just an ordinary bowl nothing to see here centering the cake on top of the tada bowl so again you have your three distinct layers chocolate crust amazing salted caramel beautiful bittersweet ganache got a final shower of salt and if you could you would like it The most decadent gourmet version of why a chocolate bar is so enjoyable to eat.

This is the perfect example of that. I don't know. Dinka nailed it. She did my best any way you slice it. Now I can try it. What is there to tell you? Carla's nails smell bad and are dirty, no, they just have Coco under them. Carlos's nails are very clean and taste delicious.