Egg Tarts (Dan Tat)

Although Göttingen is supposedly one of the most international towns in Germany, most of the asian restaurants/takeaways DO NOT resemble anything close to asian food, let alone chinese pastries...

To make matter worse, I have an extremely soft spot for excellent Chinese pastries and even wobblier penchant for tasting great Dan Tat or custard egg tarts!  (for those uninitiated, you can read more about egg tarts here)

The detective in me decided to trawl through the internet for recipes to this delicacy.

After trawling for weeks or months (already?), I got really frustrated. I mean, making Dan Tat using any of the internet recipes will work, but the kind that I have been (and still is) searching for can be described as the pinnacle of Dan Tat, the creme de la creme, and such recipes can only be obtained by working in the more famous Hong Kong chinese pastry shops or by inheritance of a family secret recipe.

The Dan Tat that is so revered by many HKers and S.E Asians is made of pastry that is widely touted as the mother-of-all-pastries! If French puff pastry is hard to master, Dan Tat pastry takes it much further. 

A truly great Dan Tat pastry must be flaky yet light and crumbly within, like a very fluffy biscuit - but also able to hold its remaining shape after the first bite. The feeling of biting through that pastry is just ______________ (yeah, indescribable!). The egg custard within must be uber smooth and silky, should not have any bubbles yet cooked to a pudding texture and topped off with a reflective sheen without the addition of extra sugar syrup or glazing agents.

Previously, Simin and I have both tried several available internet recipes but have consistently been disappointed with the pastry results, most resembled and tasted like cookies, bread, or wafer........none of which came remotely close to THAT pastry texture that we adore.

Well....until a crazy week of trial and errors of pastry making, stress from the bosses in the lab and a weird but enlightening dream!!!! (I kid you not!) 

I almost jumped out of the bed to the astonishment of a bleary-eyed wife and literally got cracking on the pastry dough and the egg custard filling.

and ladies and gentlemen, here are the results that is very close (I need to make minor changes to some ingredients) to THAT Dan Tat texture that I've been craving.

and the "cross section" after taking the first bite :-

Although the taste will never be like those tarts that Tai Cheong Bakery or Honolulu coffeeshop (both in Hong Kong and are widely rated as the best egg tarts, with Honolulu boasting egg tarts of 190 laminated layers!) I am still delighted at the lamination that developed despite my overzealous flattening of the two part dough.

I will be posting up the recipe (which will require a slight modification) soon, so watch out for it! Sorry for the delay till now as PL's laptop is still under repair. Its unfortunate he didn't write it down. For readers who have been asking for the recipe, apologies! promise it will be up as soon as we get our lappy back!

As for the taste and "feeling" of the texture, the then bleary-eyed-but-now-hungry-for-breakfast wife said one word that made the entire effort well worth. "Mmmm...mmmmmm!!!" with her eyes lit up brightly that moment.

*** NEW UPDATES!!!!!***

FINALLY, after almost 2 weeks from the day my Mac went bonkers, it is now back in my hands. It was an awful long wait which made me ponder how reliant we are on the computers in this modern era.

Well, I must first apologize for not being able to publish the recipe any sooner, but here goes:-

Basically, most chinese pastries require 2 kinds of dough:- 1) Oil dough, 2) "Water" dough.  Traditional pastries also use lard as it was much cheaper and easier to obtain than butter in yesteryears. Although many people believe that butter can be used as a substitute for lard, I would never try to do that as they are very different in terms of composition of fat, moisture and texture, which directly influences the end result of your cookie/pastry.

"Water" dough
200g All purpose flour
  50g Cake flour
1-1.5tsp double action baking powder (i could only get single action baking powder)

  30g sugar (tweak according to your sweet tooth)

  80g Lard

125ml Ice Cold water

Oil dough

100g Cake flour (sift this!)

0.5 tsp double action baking powder

125g Lard

Egg custard filling

80g white sugar

280ml Cold water

4 large eggs

40ml full cream milk

40ml cream

For the Water dough,

1. Mix the flours, baking powder and fine sugar.

2. Sift this resulting mixture into a clean bowl and cut in the lard.

3. Mix (or pulse using a food processor) until the resulting dough forms into a ball. 

4. Wrap in plastic film and let the dough relax in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour.

For the Oil dough

5. Add the baking powder into the cake flour and mix throughly.

6. Sift the flour into a cold clean bowl.

7. Cut in the lard into the flour and mix till it forms into a clean ball of uniform paste. (you can use a food processor for this.)

8. The paste should be close to spreading consistency but not fluid-like.

9. Place the oil dough ball in the center of the water dough circle and gently wrap up from the sides till its sealed without air pockets.
10. Lightly flour your kitchen tabletop and roll out the dough into a rectangle.

11. Now you can proceed with rolling and folding it like classic french puff pastry. (at least 6 turns with resting / chilling periods)

12. Make 1 extra turn at the end.

13. Measure the longest diameter of your tart mold and cut with a round cookie cutter larger than the mold by a couple of millimeters.

14. Gently and carefully line your tart mold with the cut out dough without over pressing the laminated layers. 

15. The dough pastry may look as if it was too much for the tart mold, but when it bakes, the sides will creep down, so make allowance for that.

16. Poke some holes with a fork in the base of the dough.

17. Preheat your over to 200 degrees C.

For the Egg custard filling,

18. Boil water with sugar, till all melted and keep aside till cool.

19. Crack the eggs, add in milk and cream and gently stir with a whisk until well mixed. (Try not to introduce too much bubbles)

20. Add in the cooled sugar water and gently mix well.

21. Sift the entire mixture through the finest sieve you can get your hands on and into a bowl/coffee pitcher.

22. Lower the temperature of your oven to 160 degrees C and place the tart shells onto a baking sheet in the middle layer of the oven.

23. Prebake these shells for about 10minutes or till almost ready. (constantly check through the glass window of your oven to make sure they are NOT already browned!!!)

24. Carefully remove from the oven and let the shells cool down for about 10-15minutes.

25. Lower the oven temperature to 120 degrees C.

25. Using the coffee pitcher, carefully pour in the egg custard mixture till about 2-3mm from the brim of each tart. 

26. Carefully return these filled tarts to the middle layer of the oven and bake till the custard starts setting.  (Typically, after an initial 5-10 minutes of baking, i will open the door of the oven every 5 minutes to tap/gently shake the baking sheet and observe if the egg custard remains wobbly.)

27. The texture point to stop is to first look out for the egg custard to be that between creme brulee and pudding like.

28. Remove from the oven and let it cool on a cooling rack. (you should observe a nice sheen/gloss on the custard surface)

29. Start munching already!!!

Phew....that was an extremely long winded passage!!!!! Please try it out and let me know if it worked for you! I'm still searching and experimenting to make this even better and will appreciate if you give this a go, modify it and share your experiments with me too !

P/S: Just a note for those trying this recipe for the first time. Please reduce all ingredients, and test out with 1/4 first. That should yield between 6-8 tarts depending on the size of your muffin tin. Also when rolling out the pastry, take note not to press it too thin in the final roll.

Good luck!