Carla Makes a Salted Caramel-Chocolate Tart

[Cameraman] Hold on blender.

Is that a CBD shake?

Yeah.

Cool.

Gonna chill out man.

Get some CBD mango smoothie.

I definitely need that right now.

You what?

I definitely need this right now.

You do?

Yes.

Yeah, need it all the time.

[upbeat music]

Alright guys I really have my work cut out for me today.

First of all, I'm making a Claire Saffitz recipe

and it's a baking recipe.

Always a little bit intimidating, even for me.

But this is what I'm going to be making.

Salted caramel chocolate tart.

And one of the things that is incredibly exciting

about it and what it's kind of all about

is the ground breaking use of salt in a desert.

Okay, so I'm starting with this chocolate crust.

And that's one of the three layers in the desert.

There's a chocolate crust, there's a salted caramel filling

and then on the top there's a bittersweet chocolate ganache

and then on top of that, there's flakey salt.

Alright, the chocolate part is coming from cocoa.

This is unsweetened cocoa powder.

This is sugar.

So this salt that's going into the crust,

this is kosher salt

and I wouldn't use flakey salt in the dough

because what we want here is for the salt

to disperse throughout the dough as one

of the dry ingredients.

This is all-purpose flour.

Because we're replacing part of the dry ingredients

with cocoa powder, you're losing some

of that hold-togetherness power

that you have in all-purpose.

So it makes the dough a little bit more crumbly.

A little bit closer to,

in French pastry they would call a sable dough.

Sable means sandy.

You'll notice that I am working the butter

more than I would necessarily for a flakey dough.

I'm actually working this enough with my fingers,

oh, it makes little powder explosions, cocoa powder puffs,

to really work the butter down to a very fine texture.

We can talk about salt in desert.

Salt and chocolate are really important to pair together.

Chocolate just takes so well to the flavors of salt

and it kind of brings out all of the flavors

in the chocolate itself.

Salt does another thing which is that it tempers butter fat

so if you tried making a crust or a cookie without salt

and eat it, it's just gonna taste very one dimensional.

So I have one large egg yolk goin' in

and three tablespoons of whole milk.

A fork is nice cause it keeps things pretty fluffy

and let's everything pass through.

I just prefer using my hands.

I feel like the fork got everything pretty distributed

but I feel like I can get a much better sense here

with my fingers.

So I don't wanna go crazy but I'm working it more

than I would a regular dough and getting

to the point where it holds together when squozen.

Got your plastic wrap.

You got your dough and now it looks really crumbly.

Anyway, I'm making my little chocolate bundle

using the plastic wrap to squeeze it

and to press it into a disc.

The rounder it is now, the better chance I'm gonna have

of making it round when I roll it out

and also the better for frisbee'ing.

Turoda, are we ready?

Fling!

[laughing]

The dough as I was talking about before,

this is a shorter kind of a pastry dough.

You might feel like it's falling apart

or it's getting crumbly or it's cracking more than usual,

don't worry about it.

One of the things that's great about this dough

is that you can kinda patch it

and push everything back together.

And then I was also reading about short crust doughs

in preparation for this video.

The way that I look at it is,

the things that I don't know about and that other people

are better at than me is something that is just a fact

of life because I'm surrounded

with all these incredible people everyday.

But all of those are just an opportunity

to figure something out that I don't know.

I've talked about how Chris Morocco had told me once

about rolling a dough, like turning it,

giving it a quarter turn every pass is a great way

to avoid cracks.

There are going to be moments later

on where we might see some cracking

and I'm gonna do the exact same thing then.

I'm gonna use the dough to patch all of those cracks.

Alright, so what I want now, this is the way I do it,

you can measure with a ruler but I like

to take the tart pan that I'm going into

and just give it an eyeball.

The dough should be a couple inches bigger

than the outside edge of this.

The normal way that I like to do this is I roll the dough

onto the pin and then I lift it and put it back down.

If we do that here, this dough is too sable.

It's too sandy, it's too crumbly.

It's not gonna work.

So what I'm gonna do is lift up a little edge here

and toss a little flour under

and then I'm just gonna slide this under.

This is gonna become my lifter

and then carefully, lifting the edges of the dough over

so that everything is kinda contained on this,

think of this as a little lifting platform.

And now I can lift it up without anything breaking off

and just lower it into the pan

and then I can unfold instead of having to lower it in,

I'm just unfurling the sides

and you don't wanna press too much in there

because that's just gonna make the dough thin

but I need a little extra here

because there's a missing link

and then I'm just keeping my eyes peeled

for any little cracks or thin spots.

Taking this rolling pin again,

I'm just gonna run it over the top

and zip all this excess over so it's just getting cut off.

I'm gonna dock the bottom with this fork

and what that does, it prevents the dough

from puffing up in the oven.

They're gonna fill back in.

It's not like the bottom of your tart is gonna have holes

in it and caramel is gonna leak out.

These are gonna fill back in but having a little place

for the air to go is gonna prevent it from turning

into a big rocky, bumpy surface.

This is gonna go now and get frozen until it's firm.

Ta da, oh hi guys.

Alright, so moving on to the salted caramel part

of the salted caramel chocolate tart.

So cream of tartar because it's an acidic ingredient

is gonna prevent the sugar crystals from wanting

to get back together and stay together.

So that's really key when you're making caramel.

So I'm starting over medium-low heat

and I'm gonna heat this pretty gently at the beginning

until I'm 100% sure that all of the sugar has dissolved

and the way that you can tell is, obviously it's not gonna

have this whitish grainy appearance.

It'll get clear and thin and just look like a sugar syrup

but you don't wanna rush that and it's totally fine,

and in fact, don't worry about it at all,

that you can stir during that step.

So again, if you raise the heat now and do it too soon,

you're gonna dissolve some of the sugar but not all of it

and your caramel will never caramelize.

Alright, this is just about clear.

Totally clear there, now I've got bubbles.

Now I feel good.

Now is the time to say goodbye to the stirring phase

of the caramel.

I'm turning the heat up just a touch.

You know, the phase from white to a light pale yellow

is like forever and ever and ever

but from that pale yellow to completely finished

is like two minutes so,

again, don't sleep on the caramel, guys.

Just have to watch.

It can be soothing.

Nice clear bubbles.

That's another thing that I'm looking for

and feeling relieved about if there was any kind

of foaminess or residue on the tops of those bubbles,

that's a sign that your sugar is still crystallized

and you're not gonna have a caramel.

Instead of being completely clear,

this looks like very very very pale, like watered down honey

which means the caramelization process has started.

Now things are happening.

Maple syrup color but the instructions in this,

it's a dark amber with wisps of smoke.

I see a little bit of smoke.

Little bit of snoke.

Alright, very carefully now because this is incredibly hot

and there's water and butter and water boils

at a much lower temperature is what's happening in here.

I'm adding the butter into the caramel

and it foams up pretty energetically

and then I'm gonna stir this until I feel like that butter

is melted which obviously is happening incredibly quickly

and then adding the cream again, same sputtering

and buttering is gonna go on, and the salt.

Alright, now I wanna stir this until it's just completely

dissolved and this foaming subsides.

So now that everything is dissolved, no lumpy bumpies.

Alright, I've got my frozen, raw,

fork-pricked chocolate tart crust.

The next step is to blind bake this crust.

Blind baking just means you're baking it

without anything in it which is kind

of a misnomer because it has to be filled with pie weights

and then, oh, it's really heavy.

These are ball bearings.

If you have just regular pie weights at home

or dried beans or rice, that is 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're incredible.

Alright, so those are in there.

The job of the pie weights is to keep the crust

from slumping or puffing during the blind baking

and this cooks in two stages.

About halfway through, I'm gonna take the ball bearings out

but for now they need to be in.

Oh, ball bearings are heavy.

Alright, so now we're making the third and final layer

of this tart is a bittersweet chocolate ganache.

So what I have here is called a double boiler

and it's just simmering water under there.

Bittersweet chocolate, it's important to double check,

don't go above 70% cacao.

If you do, the ganache could break and get oily.

A little bit more of unsalted butter and heavy cream.

So I'm just stirring.

This goes a lot faster than the caramel so it's cool.

So the butter is almost melted.

Every other component in this dish has salt.

The ganache doesn't and that's because on the very top

of the ganache, there's gonna be a shower

of flakey salt crystals.

So that's where the chocolate and then the salts

are gonna have their moment, don't worry.

I feel great about this.

So now that everything is melted and completely smooth

you just have to leave it at room temperature,

don't put it in the fridge or anything,

it'll cool down too unevenly.

Alright I wanna check on that blind baking tart crust.

Okay, so what I'm looking for and I can tell

without moving this around too much is that we've arrived,

is that the edges of the crust are starting to look dry.

The bottom of the crust is gonna have

to go a little bit longer but now it's safe

to take the weights out.

And another thing to make sure as you're lifting

the pie weights out is that the parchment paper

or the foil that you used is not sticking to the bottom

and that you don't accidentally lift out

the entire tart while you do this.

Going back in.

I've got my blind baked, cooled, tart shell.

It's important that the tart shell itself has time

to cool down but it's okay that my caramel,

the salted caramel that I made before is still

a little bit warm.

Oh my god, it looks so good.

It's a little bit runnier than it's going

to be when it's completely cool but you can kinda get

a sense of what that finished texture is gonna be

if the caramel is too oozy,

what happens is when you cut a slice, the caramel runs out,

the ganache roof sinks down and just flattens out.

So it was worth it, we messed around

but that's how you get to be BA's best,

you know what I mean?

This is gonna cool down now with the caramel

in there before we add the ganache,

all the layers have to be cool.

If they weren't, the chocolate would melt on contact

and then that would be not what we want.

It's not warm to the touch anymore.

It's all the same temperature and it's in the cooled crust.

So now is the fun part where we get

to do the swooshes and the swirls.

So one of the things that Claire

and I talked about was like leaving a little bit

of an edge around the border so that you can see

the caramel underneath but just using the back

of a spoon, you kinda get to make all

of these decorative swirls

and the cooler the ganache is, the more they're gonna hold.

Oh la la, I love them.

This is the last part of the salted caramel chocolate tart

which is Fleur de sel, or any flakey salt really.

Fleur de sel is a salt from Brittany, somebody fact check me

and they're very delicate, kind of like,

shards that sometimes form into little pyramid shapes.

So this is just regular old bowl, ordinary,

nothing to see here.

Centering the tart on top of the bowl, ta da.

So again, you've got your three distinct layers.

Chocolate crust, incredible salted caramel,

beautiful bittersweet ganache, that final shower of salt

and if you could have the most decadent,

gourmet version of why a candy bar is so enjoyable to eat,

this is the perfect example of that.

I don't know, think I nailed it.

Did my very best.

Anyway you slice it, I now get to try it.

What is there to say?

Carla's fingernails are so dirty.

No, they just have cocoa underneath them.

Carla's fingernails are very clean and they taste delicious.