Tarte Tropézienne: From Polish Immigrant to French Icon

Bonjour, Emily.

Bonjour, Caroline.

We are the real fishwives of Paris, and today we're going to be fancy fishwives because we're talking about Saint Tropez.

Yeah.

Have you ever been to Saint Tropez?

I have not, and I don't want to go unless I'm staying somewhere very expensive, ideally for free.

Well.

And so what's funny about that is that obviously Saint Tropez these days is very well known for the glitz and the glamour and the fact that it's very, very f fancy.

But that's really, really recent.

Up until, like, 60 years ago, it was just like a little fishing village.

Just a little fishing village.

Nothing place, kind of.

But now it's fancy, and I want to go there, and I want to be fancy.

It's very fancy.

It's full of obnoxiously rich Americans.

That's true.

Which does not appeal to me, actually, very much to be around them.

But I'm sure there are still some, like, nice French places.

I really hope so.

Yeah.

The way that it got so famous is because it had a starring role in a movie called Et Dieu Cres a la femme.

And God made women, and God created woman.

And in that movie, it still looks like a cute little fishing village.

And I want to go to that St. Tropez, but I don't know if you can.

That Saint Tropez is dead, Emily.

Damn it.

Yeah, sorry about that.

That Saint Tropez is now.

That boulangerie is now a Gucci.

Well, speaking of boulangerie, Saint Tropez is known now as being this glitzy, glamorous sort of spot, and it's also really well known for a very specific pastry called the tarte troupezienne.

Tarte tropezienne.

And that's what we're talking about here today.

We're not just talking about the village.

We are talking about a tart, because we are tarts.

Yeah.

We are indeed tarts.

And this tart.

I'm not a tart anymore.

I'm an old married lady.

I've actually never really been a tart.

I've always kind of been a nerd.

You could be a nerd and a tart.

That's.

That's true.

I've mostly just been a nerd, chiefly.

Oddly, our tart tropezienne is actually not a tart at all.

It's a brioche.

Yeah.

It's not a tart.

There's no pastry.

Like.

It's bread with pastry cream.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But the invention of Tart Tropezienne and the invention of Saint Tropez as we know it today are actually very intertwined.

Okay, okay, tell me the story.

Because I don't watch French movies because I don't want to think that hard to deal with subtitles.

Fair enough.

I mean, if you do watch Et Dieu Crre la Femme, the idea behind it is it's this sort of very young character being played by Brigitte Bardot.

Do we get into her issues in this or no?

I think we can get into her issues now.

Let's get into her issues now.

Yeah, she basically, we hate, universally hate Brigitte Bardot because she has defended Harvey Weinstein.

Right.

She has defended all, all of the abusers in the MeToo movement very publicly and basically is like, well, that's just how it is and it's fine.

And you use your feminine wiles and she's a real bitch.

I mean.

And this is basically what the movie is about.

It's about this 18 year old woman captivating all 18 year old, 18 year old child.

Okay.

Captivating all of these local men and being beautiful.

Like the whole point of the movie is like Brigitte Bardot being beautiful and.

Prancing around Central Bay that, you know what?

If that's your only personality trait, I guess being beautiful is enough.

But I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't know.

I have so many other personality traits.

Beautiful.

But yes, you have way more personality traits than being beautiful.

But yeah, so that's, that's kind of what the plot of the movie is.

So if you want to watch a movie about that, go for it.

Sounds boring, but luckily for it is pretty.

Yeah.

And luckily for us, it actually did deliver us a cake.

A cake.

So we got a cake.

Okay.

And this is funny because we see this played out again and again and again and again.

This cake ain't even French.

It is not.

It is Polish.

So the guy who invented this cake is Alexandre Mika.

He was a Polish immigrant to France.

He set up shop in, in the Provence region on the Cote d'.

Azur.

And he started baking this cake, this brioche cake stuffed with cream, which he said was.

He was adapting from his grandmother's recipe.

So his Polish grandmother's recipe.

And we look at Polish bakes.

So I would love to be corrected by the Internet.

Internet, correct me, I did a lot of Googling to try and find a cake that looks like a tropezienne, which is basically a brioche filled with a creme muslin.

And I Couldn't find anything like this.

Now there's a lot of brioche in Poland.

So there's.

And there's a lot of also brioches that are named after grandmothers.

Okay, so babka means grandmother.

It's a cake that's named after a grandmother and it's a brioche.

You have other, you know, sort of brioche buns that have custard or cream.

Often like a sort of cheese bake based custard.

Kind of like what we think of as a Danish in the States.

You have a lot of that in Poland.

Almost like a bent.

Like a donut.

Almost like a donut.

Like a brioche filled.

Like a filled brioche?

Yeah, but like one.

Are they squeezed inside rather than cut open and filled?

No, no, no.

It would be something more like you make a brioche dough.

You make a.

Well, you fill it with like a cheese baked based custard and then you bake the whole thing.

So you have like a cheese Danish kind of vibe.

Pretty good.

Delicious.

A lot of the time they'll have fruit like plums.

And you also see other countries that are making brioche that look a little bit more like a tart tropezienne.

So like a brioche that's then filled like the brioche is baked and then it's filled with custard afterwards.

You see that.

For example, in Italy there's another brioche that's called Polish brioche that's named after Poland.

But in Poland itself, I haven't been able to find anything that looks quite like a tatro bizienne.

Okay.

Well, I mean, he was innovating for sure.

Exactly.

So we have a Polish immigrant comes to Paris, bakes a cake that he says is an ancestral Polish tradition and starts selling it in central.

I'm going to be pedantic.

You said he came to Paris, but he came to Saint Maxime, Right?

He did go to Sainte Maxime.

You are correct.

Yes.

He did not.

Not all roads lead to Paris, but they do.

But they're not.

Not everything.

They do eventually.

So this cake he actually invents before the filming begins for Idiot fm.

So it exists, but he is tapped to provide the breakfast to the crew.

So he's bringing coffees and cakes to everybody who's filming.

And Brigitte Bardot takes a particular liking to.

To this cake that he's making in honor of his grandmother.

And so she says to him, oh my gosh, this is so good you're making it in Saint Tropez.

Because at this point, he's opened a bakery in Saint Tropez.

You should call it the Tarte de Saint Tropez.

And he's like, okay, I think I'm going to actually call it the Tarte Tropezienne.

Tarte Tropezienne, which means the tart from Saint Tropez.

And so this is sort of what gives it its first brush with star power.

Well, and so the popularity of this film really blew up this village.

Exactly.

So when this film comes out, not only Brigitte Bardot, but now all sorts of other French movie stars like Jean Paul Belmondo are starting to spend time in Saint Tropez.

And because there's stars coming in, there's money coming in, there's money, there's.

There's then tourism and just these incredible places.

You know, I guess it's also just a different time where people have money for leisure, they have time, they have vacation, they have transport, we have cars.

You know, like, it's not hard to imagine why a place like Saint Tropez wasn't always popular, because people didn't have vacations or money or time.

And, you know, they're finally discovering these little villages all along the southern French coast that are magical.

Yeah.

And beautiful.

And it all happens quite quickly, really.

And then by the 70s, it's become so popular that he actually decides to trademark the phrase Tart Tropezienne.

So we can see that in a matter of just 20 years.

Yeah.

It's going to sort of take off.

It's been so popular.

And it's interesting because a lot of the famous ghetto in France are invented by, like, one person and then kind of kick off.

Yeah.

I mean, is the trademarking of it.

Does that mean that nobody else can make it?

Because clearly people can make it or that they have to pay him royalties?

No.

So it's interesting because he's trademarked the name and he actually opened a chain of bakeries that sell tatro bizienne.

Okay.

But what's cool is he actually was kind of tickled by the fact that other people wanted to make his tatt.

And as long as they don't call it.

They might call it Tropezienne Tropezien.

Or they might call it what Brigitte Bardot wanted to call it, which was.

And that in the States, I feel like would be an invitation to go to court.

Yeah.

And he sort of like, he heard that.

What's his face?

Cedric Rolay.

Yeah.

Who's like the Instagram.

Instagram star of history world was doing his own version.

He was like, that's cool.

Yeah, he likes it.

He's got to be an old man, though.

A little bit of a generous spirit here, but also an enterprising businessman, you.

Know, who these days has about 30 shops selling or specializing in the tart of Saint Tropez, sort of dotted all along the Mediterranean.

There actually used to be one here in Paris, but it's closed now, so you have to seek your tarte de Saint Tropez elsewhere.

Well, what is a tal Tropezienne and can you make it at home?

Yes, absolutely.

So it's a brioche that is our base and this is a teeny tiny one.

But often they could be in different sizes.

You could have a six person one, an eight person one.

It's brioche, Right.

So it's an enriched egg and butter enriched dough.

So brioche already as an enriched dough is something that we see in France again thanks to influence and innovations from Eastern Europe.

So brioche in France, we have some ancestral brioches.

One of the oldest is going to be the gache de vend.

So that's going to be an enriched dough that has orange blossom water in it.

But traditionally, when we talk about brioche, we're talking about an enriched sort of sweet bread that'll kick off really in popularity in the 19th century when a couple of things happen.

Stand mixers.

Stand.

Stand mixers.

Try to make that shit without a stand mixer is not going to be easy.

I did it once by hand and it involves basically gathering the dough up and.

And the only accurate way that I can describe this is you kind of pretend that you're Spider man and you, Spider man, fling the dough away from you.

That doesn't bothers me.

It is so, so tedious.

It's wet, it's sloppy, it's very wet.

Yeah.

But brioche we're going to see, you know, at a time in the 19th century when the French don't necessarily need to rely on bread as their primary source of, you know, nutrients, they're going to start leaning into the fantasy breads that come in thanks to Austrian immigration.

Or one Austrian immigrant, August Tsang, who comes in the 19th century, opens a bakery that is going to take influences From Hungary, from Austria, and kind of allow us to make enriched doughs a little bit more democratized.

So brioche is going to really come in at that point.

Not.

But the brioche idea predates it.

It's always going to be this sort of rich idea.

Which is why in French, Marie Antoinette doesn't say, let them eat cake.

She says, qu' il mange de la brioche.

Let them eat brioche of the starving revolutionaries.

I mean, it still was, you know, an expensive.

Yeah.

Egg and butter filled bread.

Exactly.

So it's fancy.

That's the idea, is that brioche is always fancy.

It is.

In France, oddly enough, we actually have a brioche that we call brioche polonaise.

And so it's made with leftover brioche that you soak in syrup and then almost like a baba kind of.

Yeah.

And then you put like buttercream in with it.

So that's not this, but it's got.

It's going to be another sort of.

We've got this idea that polish baked goods in France, in the French mind, polish baked good is brioche with cream.

Okay.

And this one does have a cream.

Yes, also.

Yes.

Sprinkled with pearl sugar.

And pearl sugar is something that you see a lot in France, specifically because France gets most of its sugar not from sugar cane, but from beet sugar.

We need to do an episode on that.

Sugar beets.

Yeah.

It's so interesting.

We do.

But, yeah, pearl sugar is a byproduct of making sugar from sugar beets.

And so we end up with like these sort of clumpy clusters of sugar that come together naturally.

No, they're not hard.

And we often will sprinkle them on top of things like chouquettes, which is.

They hold their shape too when you.

Bake them, so it makes for a nice topping.

So the brioche is typically.

Yeah.

Dusted with pearl sugar and then we fill it with cream.

However, there is some debate on the great wide interwebs of which creams are used to fill your tat tropezienne.

Well, you probably do what you want, but it's going to be a base of pastry cream, that's for sure.

So what is pastry cream?

So pastry cream is like the mother sauce of French pastry.

And it's something that we make other creams from based on the basis of it.

So it is egg yolks or whole eggs that is possible, plus sugar, a thickener stabilizer, which could be cornstarch, it could be flour and milk.

And so you heat up the milk usually with vanilla bean in it and some sugar already maybe in the milk.

Then you're going to mix your eggs or egg yolks more commonly and the sugar in a bowl.

And then you're going to temper that with the, the pastry cream.

And that's also.

You've already got your cornstarch in there too with the hot milk.

And then you'll pour it back in and cook it until it's done.

And you do actually cook it until it like plops a boil.

And then often what we learned in cordon bleu was you wait a second for the bottom to kind of like thicken and then you just plop it onto a tray to cool down.

And then you're going to loosen it back up once it's cold and make sure to whisk out any lumps, really make sure you could even pass it through a strainer if you were really hardcore.

And then it's the basis for all of the other French creams.

So as it stands, it's already the traditional filling for things like eclairs or religieuse or, you know, all of those like, kind of like stodgy cream filled French desserts.

It's yummy, but it's eggy, it's custardy, and it's pretty thick and sort of gloopy.

And so you can lighten it up in a number of ways or make it richer.

One of the options is a creme choubouse, which is pastry cream plus Italian meringue.

Italian meringue is super stable.

That's a meringue that uses cooked sugar syrup to basically like immediately cook out those egg whites while they're blending.

It's something that we tend to do less at home because it's a little bit sketchy with the sugar syrup.

It's a little bit dangerous to do, but it's what you would put on top of like a lemon meringue pie, for example, and you mix those two together, you're gonna add a little bit of the Italian meringue at first.

You know, you wanna lighten it up slowly.

That's gonna give you a nice light cream.

There's creme diplomat, which is pastry cream plus whipped cream plus gelatin to stabilize it because whipped cream is pretty unstable.

And then you've also got creme mousseline, which is pastry cream with butter.

So when you were saying you could make it even richer.

Even richer, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

The one thing that a tart Trapezienne is going to have is that it is flavored with orange flower water.

So it has this really pretty aromatic character to it that takes it beyond just a brioche and cream.

Right.

And so most people think that the actual recipe behind the trademark tarte tropezienne is gonna be pastry cream plus French buttercream, which is buttercream that's got.

It's even richer because it's got egg yolks in it.

Yes.

So a French buttercream is not one of our standard cake covering buttercreams, mostly because it's actually looser.

It's not as stable as a Swiss meringue buttercream or an Italian meringue buttercream.

Like normally, like the average American baker when they're making a buttercream, if they're not making American buttercream, which is just butter and powdered sugar, which I cannot stand, it's fine on a cupcake, and that's it.

I do not like the flavor of cold butter.

And so eating buttercream makes me so cringy.

I'm not into it.

It's not very sophisticated.

Swiss meringue buttercream would be a more typical cake covering, which is just a lot lighter, so you can eat more of it almost.

It gets nicer.

French buttercream is awesome.

So it's the same thing, but with egg yolks, but it is looser, and so it won't, like, firm up as much.

It's not as stable, and so it's better as a filling than it is as, like, a covering.

But I think if you mixed that with pastry cream, it would be awesome.

It would definitely be rich.

And that's probably what we have here in our tarte tropezienne.

So this is actually a tropezienne, not a tarte tropezienne, because we are in Paris, and so there are no tarte tropeziens here.

There's no authentic tarte tropezienne.

Yeah.

So the tarte tropezienne does still exist.

They make a lot of them.

They make about 2,500 of them every single day.

Wow.

And they do, as you mentioned, the large form ones, which you can buy a slice of, they do mini ones, which they call baby tropical.

The French are obsessed with using English words in things.

So this is not a baby trop.

It's a baby baby trop.

Baby trop.

And they, as you.

As we'll see a lot if you come over to France and you go to pastry shops here, a huge trend is making a single form of something and then changing up the flavors.

So, you know, you'll see Eclair de Genie that does like multiple kinds of eclairs.

You'll.

You'll see Odette, which does multiple kinds of cream puffs.

At Tart Tropezienne, they do multiple flavors of tart Tropezienne.

Okay.

So you'll see things like blueberry.

You'll see things like genepe.

Ooh, yeah.

Which is kind of crazy.

We should do an episode on genepe.

We should totally do an episode on genepe.

You'll eat.

Everyone's like, what's geneby?

You'll find out.

Tune in.

You'll also see a play on like a Perry breast one with like hazel.

Hazelnut praline.

So lots of different flavors.

But as you mentioned, the classic is orange blossom water, which is a very sort of Mediterranean flavor.

I love it.

I'm a huge fan.

So it just has.

And I'm not usually a fan of florals in sweets, but I love Floranger.

Me neither.

I don't like rose.

I don't like lavender.

I like fleur de oranger.

I don't know, it gives me like.

I don't know, it just gives me life.

I love it.

Yeah, it's delicious.

But we did not go all the way to Saint Tropez to buy this tart tropezienne.

Although I'm very happy to be invited to Saint Tropez if they want us to invite us.

If you're a five star hotel in Saint Tropez, please invite us and we will make some content about the fish that you import from Japan.

Here in Paris, you have a lot of the superstars of the French pastry world, people like Philippe Contincini, who are making them.

You have, obviously Cedric Grolet is making his own version.

This one actually comes from Benoit Castell, who is a very well known baker here in Paris and he has his own three bakeries that are named after him.

So Benoit Castell's bakery are all called Benoit Castell and he does both the large form and a mini tropezienne, which here, I mean, it's a very, very light brioche with blobs of this sort of cream.

And then on top, you always, at Benoit Castell have this little sable which is like his calling card.

So that's the only non traditional part of this particular baby Tropezienne.

Definitely some butter in here.

More than I would think a pastry cream would have.

So then maybe it is with muslin,.

The orange flower Water is in the brioche rather than the cream, and the.

Brioche is quite light.

The cream itself is very sweet, but the brioche isn't.

No, it's nice.

So it's really.

It definitely has a lot of butter in it.

It's something I forget about, but I like it a lot, actually.

Yeah, it's nice.

And the thing about it is also, like, it's not that fancy.

No.

It's like you could bring this to, like, a Sunday lunch.

Or to the beach.

Or to the beach, yeah.

Yeah.

It's not a crazy, intense French dessert.

It feels very much like a South of France dessert.

It's not hard to eat either.

No.

You know, you.

This.

This could be a picnic.

Yeah.

But it is hard to find.

So in preparing for this episode, we ran all around the city trying to track one of these down, and we didn't necessarily want to pay top dollar for Cedric Gourlay's version.

Yeah, that's not necessary.

His version is made in the shape of a flower.

I've seen it on.

You have seen the video.

But his croissants, I think, cost €10 or something.

I.

Look, he's having fun on the Internet.

It is.

Does that mean that he makes the best pastries?

I don't know.

Some people got really angry about his strawberry tart the other day.

Why?

Because it's basically just a tart shell filled with a little bit of pastry cream and fresh strawberries, and it costs, like, €80.

Yeah.

So, I mean, you know what you're getting if you go there.

It's true.

You're paying for Instagram.

You are.

You're paying for his videographer.

You are.

Feel free to donate to the podcast if you'd like to pay for our videographers,.

But this one is a little bit, you know, more standard, but I think it's really well made.

You can taste, you know, that it's made with good ingredients.

It's not going to be one of those crazy ones.

It's yummy.

But from this relatively humble pastry.

Yeah.

We've actually created a kind of a world of people wanting to make their own versions.

So there was actually a contest for the best tarte tropezienne, which was judged in part by Cedric Groin himself.

I mean, look, that'll bring in the views.

He's cute.

Is he a short king?

I feel like he is.

I think he gives off short king vibes.

Yeah, he looks short, but he be that.

Yeah.

And that's what matters.

And so the first place winner in this contest.

Now I just want to eat the sugar.

I know.

So the first place winner in this contest actually added a little bit of their own spin to the flavorings, because we do see them with all sorts of different flavors.

I mean, it's a blank canvas.

Yeah.

And I liked this idea of using.

So Saint Tropez is not very far from Menton.

Menton is known for the quality of its citrus.

And so the winner of this contest, Xavier Baudet, infused his cream with Saint Tropez lemons.

And so that's got an echo of the Fleur d', Anger, which is the classic, but also using a local ingredient, which I think, you know, kind of responds to our desire these days with this, like, locavore mindset, Bringing it back to the terroir and taking something that is, you know, a foreign import into France and really rooting it in France and in Saint Tropez specifically.

That sounds amazing.

I would be a judge that great.

I think we should be judges at that contest.

This was.

Over by the time this airs.

Probably, yeah.

2027.

2027.

We will judge your.

Your Tropezien.

We'll be there.

This is cool.

And I love the idea that the original owners, the original chef, and the people that own the Tropezien trademark now love it.

They're here for it.

They're not trying to shut it down.

They're.

I mean, it just brings them more prestige, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, I think that's.

That's the appropriate way to deal with the fact that someone's copying you is maybe not to be a dick about it and say, cool.

Thanks so much for thinking my idea was awesome.

Exactly.

Good on you.

Said Ricolet.

Mine's still the best.

Yeah.

We are the real fish pipes of Paris.

And I'm hungry.

Let's demolish this taat.

Thanks, Emily.

Au revoir.