At a particular point during this tart (after I filled with lemon curd), I dropped the whole thing and had to start over. I learned that some shortcuts could be taken, but this is the ideal procedure for making this delicious tart.
Crust:
2.5 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 sticks unsalted butter, cold, cut into 1 inch pieces.
3 tablespoons ice cold water
1/2 tablespoon apple cider vinegar (if you don't add this, just add a little more water)
Place flour, salt and sugar in a food processor and pulse until combined. Add the cold butter and pulse until the butter crumbles are roughly the same size of peas. Add the water and vinegar through the feed tube while pulsing. The dough will still be in pieces (do NOT overprocess) with obvious butter crumbs. Dump your dough out onto a clean surface with plastic wrap readily available. Divide into two mounds (just to make easier to work with) and work quickly to knead each mound once over with the palm of your hands. Quickly gather each mound together so it is the shape of an extra large hockey puck. For this tart, make one round significantly larger than the other (and use the bigger one). Wrap in plastic wrap, and squeeze over the plastic wrap until the dough is a cohesive round. This whole process should take no more than five minutes. The point is to keep the butter as cold as possible, so you work it as little as you can (hands are quite warm). Put each round as it gets wrapped up in the fridge for 20 minutes before you roll them out.
Have all purpose flour ready when you roll out the dough. I usually start rolling with the plastic wrap still on until it it slightly flattened. I then sprinkle some flour on a clean work surface, unwrap my pie dough, flour the top of the now flattened round, and roll out the dough. If you don't have a rolling pin, I've used bottles of olive oil and bottles of wine before. They worked pretty well. Keep moving the dough around, and roll by starting at the center of the dough and rolling outward until the dough is around 1/4 inch thick all around. Using a pastry brush, brush extra flour off of the surface. Get the underside of the crust by draping over your arm, like so:
Fit the rolled out dough into the tart pan. The sides of the tart should be thicker, so ideally the round should be an inch-ish larger around than the pan so you can fold the extra dough in.
This will be what the fitted pan looks like:
Once the dough is fitted into the pan, you're going to want to pre bake it a little before (aka blind baking). However, you have to weigh the dough down so it doesn't puff up. I don't like the traditional pastry weights, so I line the whole thing with parchment paper, and then fill it up with dried beans and rice. You can use these beans and rice several times.
Bake the pie crust for around 20 minutes at 425 degrees. Let it cool while you make your lemon curd. Turn the oven down to 300 degrees.
Lemon Curd:
2 teaspoons lemon zest
14 large egg yolks
3/4 cup sugar
6 tablespoons strained lemon juice
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
a pinch of salt
In a medium saucepan, beat the yolks and sugar until well blended. Add lemon juice, butter and salt. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly until mixture has thickened (will coat your mixing utensil, but still liquid enough to pour). Discard residue, and pour your curd into your cool pie crust. Put back in the oven for 7-10 minutes (at 300). You'll know it's done when you shake it (lightly) and it doesn't giggle. Again, allow to cool.
At this point you have a few options. You can add cookie crumbles, a layer of sponge cake or just skip this step and just add meringue. I added a layer of sponge cake - which I made a day prior to making the tart. But here is the recipe I used:
Ingredients:
1/3 cup sifted cake flour
2.5 tablespoons cornstarch
4 large eggs
1 large egg yolk
1/2 cup superfine sugar
3/4 teaspoon
1/4 cream of tartar
Butter 2 9 inch round cake pans.
Whisk together the flour and cornstarch in a small bowl.
Separate 2 of the eggs, placing the yolks in one large mixer bowl and the whites in another. To the yolks, add the remaining 2 eggs, the additional yolk and 1/2 cup of the sugar. Using the whisk attachment on a standing mixer, beat the whites on high speed for around 5 minutes until around tripled in volume. Lower the speed and add in the vanilla.
Sift half of the flour mixture over the egg mixture and fold together, gently until combined. Repeat with second half of the flour.
Beat egg whites until foamy with a clean whisk attachment. Add cream of tartar and beat until soft peaks form. Beat in remaining sugar and pour into prepared pans. Level with an offset spatula.
Bake for around 7 minutes, or until you can press on the cake and it springs back up. Loosen the sides of the cake with a knife and unmold immediately by inverting onto a wire rack to cool. You'll have to cut in half with a serrated bread knife to make a more appropriate height for the tart.
Once you place the cake onto the tart, you can make your meringue. This is very easy. In a standing mixer with a whisk attachment, beat 4 egg whites until foamy at medium speed. Add 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar, and increase speed to high. Add the sugar gradually, and let beat until stiff peaks form.
You can either pipe the meringue over the tart or just spread it over. I was running low on time (see first paragraph, when I said I DROPPED this tart at one point and had to start over), so I just blobbed it right on and spread.
Bake the completed tart at 500 degrees for 3-5 minutes...watch carefully, the meringue just has to begin to brown. Once the tart cools a little, you can remove the sides of the tart pan (this will make sense if you know what a tart pan is, it's similar to a springform pan, makes it easy to detach the bottom from the sides). Here is a side shot:
And here is a side view of the layers:
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