Applesauce tarts

I love fruit and pie crust, or fruit and tart crust, or ... well, you get the idea.  Cooked sweetened fruit in its own sauce balanced against a flavorful crust of just about any type is always a treat.  When I was kid I used to make something I called applesauce pocket tarts.  In reality, they weren't actual tarts since a tart by definition is an open pastry crust containing a filling of some type, meaning they aren't covered as is the case with many pies.  However, then (when I was a kid) as now, store-bought pop tarts were a popular item, and they are a closed pastry containing a filling.  So when I made applesauce tarts I called them tarts since they looked a lot like pop tarts.

Recently I was making a chocolate cream pie, and I happened to have some pie crust dough left over.  So I rolled it out fairly thin and used a bench knife to cut the edges straight.  Pie crust dough works really well for this little snack and you don't have to think about trying to keep it flaky.  I worked the dough fairly vigorously since it was comprised of left over scraps from making the pie and I wanted it all to hold together really well for my tart that really isn't a tart.

Tarts have been around a long time, since somewhere in the 1400s or 1500s, while pies came a bit earlier, perhaps by a couple hundred years.  Tarts are typically made with a different type of crust which allows them to be free-standing and therefore do not require being served from a pie plate.  When they came about, it is thought that they were considered to be something more fitting for the noble class while pies were for the ordinary commoners in society.

My understanding is that tarts originally were savory with meat fillings while sweet fillings began to be used later.  For my tart I chose unsweetened applesauce, just as I did when I was a kid.  Sure, an apple compote would have been better but I had no apples, just plenty of applesauce.  I added a bit of sugar to it, some cinnamon and then heated it in a saucepan.  This is important since a cold applesauce will slow the cooking of the inside layer of the tart crust.  I spooned it onto my prepared  crust, folded it over to make a pocket (hence the name "pocket tart" from when I was a kid), and sealed it by pressing the edges with the tines of a fork.  Then I brushed it with an egg wash.  Sometime I also sprinkle some decorator's sugar over the top, but not this time.

Pop it into the oven at 375 for 15 or 20 minutes and out comes a very tasty snack.  The applesauce filling is nothing fancy, but this isn't supposed to be fancy.  I always like it when a little applesauce escapes the pocket.  When I'm making something on the fly like this I'm often not too fussy about perfection and so the sealed edges sometimes let a little filling ooze out.  But that's OK because the sugars in that leaked filling caramelize which adds a nice touch to our little dessert.

When I was a kid we never had store-bought pop tarts around and so it was fun to bake my own version.  It seems everyone ate them all the time for breakfast back then.  I wonder if anyone knew that the idea for the original store-bought pop tarts came from a dog food that was moist but didn't require refrigeration.  It was thought that people would love to have the same thing in an easy-to-prepare breakfast food so the same technology used to make the dog food was applied to the idea of pop tarts.  Apparently when they first came out in 1964 they were so popular that the first shipments sold out in two weeks, and Kellogg's ran advertisements admitting they goofed in underestimating the potential demand.  I don't know if any of that first shipment was fed by owners to their dogs, but I'm sure the dogs wouldn't have complained.  I don't have a dog, and my cat certainly wasn't interested in my applesauce tart, so I had it all to myself.