Home & Lifestyle, Food
Fruit Tart Finishing: Classic Strawberry Presentation
Lesson time 15:13 min
For Chef Dominique, presentation is one of the most important elements in making pastries. Learn his techniques for selecting, slicing, and glazing fruit, and how to build a beautiful strawberry tart that will impress your family and friends.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Fruit Glaze, or Nappage • Strawberry Tart Assembly & Presentation
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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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...
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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