The Trader Joe's Dessert Ina Garten Deems Dinner Party Worthy

If you watch Food Network, you probably know "The Barefoot Contessa," Ina Garten, who demonstrates the best practices of home cooking and entertaining with unflappable ease. If you don't watch Food Network, however, you probably know her from the "store-bought is fine" meme — as in, "if you can't make your own lasagna/crème brûlée/portal to hell, store-bought is fine." It's a wonderful catchphrase, providing reassurance to scrambling home cooks with just a hint of passive-aggression. Yes, the meme seems to say, store-bought is fine, but not as good as what she could make — unless it happens to be Trader Joe's French Apple Tart, which Ina Garten thinks is just as good as homemade.

In December of 2022, Garten appeared on "Today" and extolled the tart's virtues to Savannah Guthrie. "The other day I had some friends over and I got an apple tart from Trader Joe's," Garten said. "I put it in the oven, [and] it was absolutely delicious." Garten may have made a career out of being a dinner party extraordinaire, but she understands the desire not to spend the whole day holed up in the kitchen like a Keebler elf, and finds the French Apple Tart to be a great way to save time. Less time in the kitchen is more time at the charcuterie board, after all.

If you dropped everything and ran to Trader Joe's at Ina Garten's suggestion, we have some bad news for you: The French Apple Tart is one of Trader Joe's many limited items, meaning you can't just get it at any time of the year. (It's usually available in the fall, around the holiday season, so it can be paired with these wines from TJ's.) But whenever you're able to get it, it's apparently worth the hype: not just from Ina Garten, but from the President of France, as well.

According to its page on the Trader Joe's website, the French Apple Tart was developed by a "Master Pastry Chef" (capitalization theirs) who "once made this exact tart — which is constructed and baked according to French tradition — for the President of France himself. Spoiler alert: He loved it." It's certainly a bold claim, and not one we're able to verify. (The first mention of the tart online is a BuzzFeed article originally published in 2020, which we suppose means this Master Pastry Chef made it for Emmanuel Macron.) But it's hard to argue with a decadent filling of apples and apricots in a shortbread crust, and even harder to argue with the Barefoot Contessa. While Ina Garten goes and plays beer pong with Taylor Swift (a real thing that happened, apparently), you can go ahead and try this dessert when it's back on the shelf.