Food, Home & Lifestyle
Fruit Tart Filling: Quick Strawberry Jam
Lesson time 04:48 min
Chef Dominique teaches you to make a simplified strawberry jam that you’ll use as a robustly flavorful second filling in the strawberry fruit tart.
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Topics include: Fruit Tart Filling: Quick Strawberry Jam
Teaches French Pastry Fundamentals
James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Dominique Ansel teaches his essential techniques for making delicious pastries and desserts in his first-ever online class.
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Jams can seem really simple, but it's a real art mastered by just a few people in France. We're going to make a quick jam, which is fast-forwarded techniques of hard-to-make jam. For this purpose, we're going to put it inside our tart. It's delicious. We're going to make a fruit jam, which is a very simple process with a few ingredients. The way we're going to make it today, I'm going to use purée, which is, essentially, juice extracted from the fresh fruit. This one was already made. But if you make your own, you can easily take strawberries, wash them, remove the stem, and pass it through the blender, pass it through a sieve, and then use this to make your jam base. There's a lot of purée that I use all year long they actually manufacture back in France. And they are made when the fruit is the ripest, when the fruits are really on-season, and when the fruit is the best. So to make the strawberry jam that goes in our fruit tart, we're going to start with some strawberry purée. We're going to place this into a pot. Bring this to a simmer. And then we'll combine together apple pectin. Apple pectin is extract from the seeds from the apple and, sometimes, the skin as well. It's reduced into a powder and it's going to be mixed with the sugar. This will set our jam. So here we have our strawberry purée. We're going to add a little bit of lemon juice. I think a little bit of acidity is always good so it gets down the sweetness. It's a good balance-- and a little bit of rum. I always like to spike up my jam by adding a little bit, a little touch of alcohol. I think it always enhance a little bit the flavor of the fruit and make it taste a little bit riper. So the purée is now heating up, so it smells like fresh strawberries. And it's very important to keep on stirring it a little bit, always medium heat so we don't burn the bottom of the pot. Once the purée is hot and starts simmering, this is where we're adding the mix of sugar and pectin. So very important to always mix the pectin with the sugar. If you don't, you'll have little pieces of pectin that is not fully dissolved. We're going to sprinkle this into the jam very gently and keep on stirring. As this cook, you will see the entire jam thickening. It's going to come to a boil. And for this, the very important step to know is that the more you cook it, the more you boil it, the thicker it's going to get. One thing to be careful of is that when the jam starts boiling, never stop mixing. Otherwise, it will stick to the bottom of the pan. I always hear people saying that they use fruits that are going bad to make jam. I don't believe in this. I believe that fresh fruit, when they're really, really ripe, should be used to make jam. There's a lot of beautiful fruits during the summer. We can easily do a peach jam, or a blueberry jam, strawberry jam. And in winter, I will do a more compote versus jam, more apple compote, or pear compote, quince. Those go very well, as well. ...
About the Instructor
Celebrated for his innovative twists on classic desserts, Cronut® creator and James Beard Award-winner Dominique Ansel has been called the “world’s best pastry chef.” In his MasterClass, Dominique teaches his essential techniques for perfect pastries. Learn baking and more with his precise methods, add classic recipes to your repertoire, and explore texture and flavor inspirations to delight friends and family with your own decadent desserts.
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Dominique Ansel
James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Dominique Ansel teaches his essential techniques for making delicious pastries and desserts in his first-ever online class.
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