Brioche Tart with White Secret Sauce - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 88th installment. The recipe is Brioche Tart with White Secret Sauce.

This tart is delicious, and one of those desserts with a number of steps, although the result is not necessarily formal looking. The components are:

• Brioche dough baked into a tart "crust" shape
• White "secret sauce"
• Fruit poached in carmelized sugar syrup

All this butter will be beaten into the dough!

This was a multi-day process - prepare brioche dough starter (yeast, milk, flour), let that rise, and then add in more flour, and mix up the dough, beating in lots of butter.  A power mixer is essential for this - the dough gets beaten for 15 minutes even before the butter is added, and then about 7 minutes to get the butter blended in.  The dough separates as you add the butter, but then magically comes back together. 

This dough rises for a couple of hours, and then you put it into the fridge overnight to continue rising.

The next day, half of this recipe of dough is made into a tart shape, which you then place inside a 10" ring (I used a springform pan, without the bottom panel).  The crust is allowed to rise for 45 minutes or so.

Next step is to pour in a custard consisting of creme fraiche and egg.  Onto that, you sprinkle sugar, which absorbs into the custard.  This is baked until the custard is set.  Myhich kind of crowded the custard into the center.

This is baked until the custard is set.  My crust puffed up quite a bit while rising, which kind of crowded the custard into the center.The toppings are a sabayon sauce-type sauce - egg yolks plus vanilla bean, whipped over hot water and then caramelized sugar syrup (with plenty of white wine is poured in and it is whipped further as it cools off.  Fold in some whipped cream, and that's the sauce.  Additional caramelized sugar and wine syrup is used to poach fruit - I used peaches, nectarines and plums, which were all available locally. 

I liked the opportunity to try something new - a bread dough used as a crust, and the syrup used for two purposes - poaching fruit and sweetening vanilla sauce.  A lot of work, but we really enjoyed the result. 

I used the second half of the brioche dough to make some loaves - one full size and one mini: