Canadian butter tart trials

Please note: when this post first published, the text mistakenly read the “left half of the pan was eliminated”. That has been corrected to “the right half”. Apologies!

It’s so cool when I come across something new (for me) in the baking and pastry world and not long thereafter I receive a request to make just that very thing. The ever popular Canadian butter tart is one of those. It’s kismet!

It turns out that a local Grand Rapidian has a Canadian friend who adores butter tarts, and she wanted to gift some to said friend for her birthday, a lovely gesture indeed. Being confident that I could deliver, I took to reviewing a number of recipes including one from NYT (the one I remembered reading not too long ago.)

For my money I’d call it a sugar tart since the filling and taste experience are indeed quite sweet (true confession - a bit over the top for me!).

As I reviewed the dough portion of a number of recipes, I found most of them contained whole egg or yolk in addition to the typical crust components of flour, butter and ice cold water. Some used a combo of lard and butter and some went with my preferred method - all butter.

I decided to follow the recipe from the NYT article and compare the dough with my standard pâte brisée (no egg). For the filling I made two versions of NYT’s and found another filling that spoke to me from the site Little Sweet Baker - less sugar and more butter plus a splash of cream - it’s a BUTTER tart after all!

Mine is certainly not a scientific study but simply my way of sharing my inaugural (and limited) experience with the butter tart world. The results are frankly hard to fully explain in terms of why a certain filling baked the best in a particular dough. Hmmm.

I blind baked the two doughs by lining a standard muffin tin (3 wells for each dough), freezing it to firm up the dough, then lining with papers and using sugar in place of dried beans as my weight, a tip learned from Stella Parks of “Brave Tart” fame. While the sugar doesn’t toast for very long this way, you can still save the sugar and use it in your shortbread or tart dough recipes to give them a hint of toasty-ness.

Once the blind baked shells were cool, I lined the remaining empty wells, 3 with each dough and proceeded with the fillings.

When making the filling, it is suggested that one use very soft or melted/cooled butter and blend the filling by hand so as to avoid incorporating air into the mix, resulting in a final, enhanced gooey-ness. I chose to keep it simple, not adding nuts or raisins as some iterations do.

The full NYT recipe blends 200 grams brown sugar ( I used dark) with 1/2 teaspoon salt; blend in 57 g soft, unsalted butter by hand until smooth, followed by 1 large egg and a teaspoon vanilla (pretty easy, eh?). The second NYT version I made replaces the 200 g brown sugar with 150 g brown sugar and 1/4 cup maple syrup with the remaining ingredients the same (meant to result in a runnier filling that some reportedly prefer).

Little Sweet Baker’s filling blends 150 g brown sugar with 75 g melted and cooled butter; add in 1 large egg, I teaspoon vanilla and 1 tablespoon heavy cream. Again, easy-peasy.

For my testing purposes I used half recipes (for the egg, whisk up one egg then weigh out 25 g which is about half a large egg.)

I guestimated about 28 g or so of filling for each tart and proceeded to dole the different fillings into the shells. Remember the central 6 wells are blind baked and the outer 6 are not.

Here they are, all filled up and ready to go.

Bake at 400ºF for about 13-15 minutes for a gooier result or up it to 17-19 minutes for a firmer result. I went for the gooey time frame - you want the crust to be nicely browned and the filling looking set and deeper brown. What surprised me is the stark difference in the color of the third (from the left) column of tarts (the NYT blind baked ones) - much lighter golden vs the deep caramel-y brown of the others.

Once baked, run a small offset spatula (my FAVE tool!) around the edges to loosen any sticky goo before it hardens. Then let them cool completely, lift them out of the tins and enjoy.

I turned them all out upside down (note the filling oozing out of the top, 3rd to the left tart) to assess the bottom crusts. I must say I’d be hard pressed to tell which were blind baked and which were not if I didn’t already know.

Time to taste! Steve was a good sport for this one - we agreed that too many tastes became quite overwhelming with the sweetness of it all.

There was no rhyme nor reason to which fillings baked up runny and which gooey - you can see below that the NYT dough/blind baked threesome yielded a runny result for all three fillings. Go figure! Lucy I just can’t ‘splain it.

The NYT dough was unpleasant in the mouth - chewy and less flaky than good old pâte brisée - and the maple syrup filling was simply too runny. Due to those two things, the right half of the pan was eliminated.

Our final analysis: the pâte brisée plus Little Sweet Baker filling won the day, and it didn’t seem to matter at all whether the crust was blind baked first.

For my final round of butter tart baking for the actual birthday order I used my classic pâte brisée, no blind baking needed. I upped the Little Sweet Baker filling recipe by 50% since I found the base recipe meant for 12 tarts to be meager. Of course, let’s remember I’d had no prior experience making these but it just felt right.

The final bake: 400ºF for 7 minutes; rotate the pan 180º and bake another 5 minutes; decrease to 375ºF and bake another 3 minutes. Since I had 12 of these for the order, I didn’t have an extra one to cut into but . . . . . imagine the end result looking like the close up above with a skosh more filling to enjoy. Sounds pretty darn good to me.

Et voilà! All boxed up and ready to go. And the feedback from the Canadian birthday girl: “a big hit”! Yippee!!

Any tips or tricks of the trade from all of you butter tart aficionados are welcome!

Stay healthy everyone!!