Rustic Blood Orange Tart with Salted Caramel Sauce

I was so excited to get an email response from Deb of the famous Smitten Kitchen blog the other day!  In it, she wrote the following thoughtful words about my little BakerBee site: 

Hi Heidi --

Thanks for your note. Your site looks lovely so far. Those crepes and those nonpariels (my favorite) are awesome looking.

Thanks for sharing,
Deb

Too cool!  Well, in honor of this little "pat on the blog" by the Smitten Baker herself, I turned back to Smitten Kitchen to make one of the many awesome recipes featured.  One such recipe I had had my eye on was this beautiful rustic tart made with colorful blood oranges.  It just so happened, too, that we were recently gifted with a few beautiful organic blood oranges right from the farm and so I thought that this recipe was definitely the perfect celebratory occasion!

One of the things that especially intrigued me about this recipe was the incredibly simple, FAST and absolutely perfect caramel sauce that Deb lent to it.  (Yes, I guess there truly is a great reason why this woman gets over 1 MILLION hits a month to her blog!  *whew* she ain't no baker-in-the-box now, people!)

The original recipe for the tart is from Food and Wine and can be found here. You can use your favorite pie crust recipe for this rustic tart base, but the one they use is a good one.

Round up your ingredients - you'll find it won't take many!

Although I tend to label myself as a bit of a purist when it comes to baking, I have come to swear by the food processor for making excellent pâte brisée and pie crusts of all other sorts.  If both Julia and Martha swore by it, I knew there had to be good reason, and there is.  The secret to perfect, flaky crust is simply this:  make it ice cold, bake it red hot.  It therefore stands to reason that the more you mess with a crust, the more it's going to heat up and therefore lose its crusty integrity. The food processor allows you to blend together your crust ingredients in a matter of seconds, and when you start with ice water and ice cold butter, you are in good shape.

I always pat my dough into discs, rather than rounds, for refrigerating.  This makes it much easier and faster to roll out when you take it out of the fridge.  (See the chunks of butter showing through in this dough?  That's exactly how you want it - 'tis this streaky effect that creates good, flaky texture!)

Roll out your dough with as little handling as you can to the size of a pizza-size stoneware if you have one, or you can improvise on a flat cookie sheet.  A good tip for keeping a pliable dough every time:  keep it moving on a lightly floured surface by flipping it with almost every pin stroke to avoid any stickage.

Blood oranges are gorgeous as you can see!  They have a sweet, less acidic taste than Navels or Valencias.  Taste teste a piece of orange (oh darn, ha!) to test for sweetness and keep the tartness or sweetness in mind when you go to sugar your tart.

The recipe calls for some of your oranges to be sliced and some to be segmented (and like Deb, I only used five oranges total.)

Look at this array of color!  

Arrange your orange slices and sections together onto a holding plate (your eyes will thank you :-)

Arrange the segments into somewhat of a pattern near the middle of your tart...

...then sprinkle segments with your sugar, top with chunks of butter, fold over your tart, and brush the tart with your egg wash.

Top your rustic tart with the orange slices in a pleasing pattern and bake away.

NOW...the pièce de résistance!

(Wow, this recipe is amazing.) 

I've adapted Deb's recipe just a smidge - here is my version:

SALTED CARAMEL SAUCE

Makes about 1 1/3 cups of sauce

1 cup sugar (organic!)

6 T. unsalted butter

good pinch of kosher salt

1/2 cup heavy cream

Pour your sugar into a medium to large size pot or Dutch oven.  Whisk the sugar over medium to moderately high heat until it melts evenly.  Continue to cook and whisk until it reaches a nice caramel color.  Add the butter all at once and stir in, then turn off heat.  Pour in the heavy cream (a little foaminess will occur) and whisk until the sauce becomes nice and smooth.  Let cool a bit and pour over your tart as desired. 

If you have any sauce remaining (ha!) -keep refrigerated for 2 weeks and microwave for about 1 minute to warm up and make pourable.

This is the trippiest part of the recipe.  You start with a clean, dry pot and add only the sugar. Heat the sugar until it melts.  Yes - from dry to wet in a matter or minutes - no liquid at all is added at this stage.  You'll go from sugar crystals to liquid like this...

...to bubbling at the perfect temp here, post butter and cream addage (remove from heat before it burns which can be a matter of seconds!)...

...to the creamiest, most delicious caramel sauce here - all in a matter in minutes!  You don't even need a candy thermometer.

Here is the finished beauty with the most unusual topping.  You'll find the tartness of the oranges is really set off well by the buttery sweetness of the caramel.  

What a colorful and unusual dessert!  :-) Enjoy.