Hello All,

Blast seems to think that if you have a griddle, you can cook almost anything. I'm not going to dispute that. However, I had an experience this weekend where I was forced to improvise my cooking appliance, and it turned out great, so I thought I'd share.

Two weekends ago, I took the family apple picking in upstate New York. This was great fun, and led to me having a huge bag full of delicious apples sitting around the house. Despite me eating two to three of them each day for a week, the number of apples in the bag never seemed to be getting smaller. Thus, when we had company coming over Saturday night, some sort of apple-based desert seemed to be prudent.

I decided to make an apple tart tatin, one of my favorite deserts. It is basically an upside-down apple tart. You start by cooking the apples in butter and sugar in a heavy, oven-proof pan on the top of the stove until the sugar caramelizes. Then you cover the pan in puff pastry and put the whole thing in the oven until it's done. Finally, you invert the pan onto a serving platter and you get a beautiful caramel colored apple tart. Yum!

So I turned on my oven to preheat it, cut the apples, and put the butter/sugar/apple mixture onto the stove. Eventually, the sugar began to caramelize and give off this wonderful candied apple aroma. All good. I unrolled a frozen puff pastry dough from the freezer, put it over the pan, and opened the oven.

And the oven was stone cold.

I fiddled with the oven for five minutes trying to figure out why is would not light, without any success as I watched the pastry dough get soft as the butter began to melt. It was looking like desert was not going to happen, until I had an idea. Why not cook it on my grill in the backyard?

I ran outside and fired up the propane grill, putting the whole pan with my tart on the "bun warmer" rack above the main cooking surface, and closed the grill cover. Ten minutes later it was looking good, and I threw some meat on the grill as well. Ten minutes after that and dinner and desert were ready.

And the tart was perfect! Sorry I don’t have pictures, but we ate all the evidence.

So this weekend's lesson is that it is entirely possible to bake on a propane grill, using indirect heat from the burners with the cover closed. No griddle required. Since the new home I'm moving into next month has an electric stove but a plumbed natural gas grill in the back, this may come in handy some day. . .

I hope someone found this interesting!

JesseLP