Rhubarb Tart

I have been meaning to make this for some time now, ever since rhubarb showed up at the grocery store back in March or April.  But I never got around to it and never got around to it.  I noticed over the past few weeks the rhubarb selection is getting smaller and smaller so I thought I’d better hurry up and get it done.

I made the crust, MSBH’s Cream Cheese Tart Dough, the day before.  It’s a simple dough and comes together in less than 10 minutes, if that.  The food processor cuts the butter and cream cheese into the dry ingredients until crumbly.

This is poured out onto a piece of plastic wrap and you use the plastic wrap to bring the dough crumbs together into a cohesive square of dough.

This chilled in the fridge overnight.  It’s important to chill it in square form, as the tart itself is baked in a square tart pan.  This make rolling it out into the shape of a square so much easier.

The rolled-out dough is placed in the tart pan, fitted and trimmed, and pricked with a fork all over to prevent air bubbles.  It then goes in the freezer before being blind baked.

My dough was very crumbly throughout the process and even cracked and separated in spots during baking.  This was not a big deal in the end, but I might process it a little longer in the food processor next time.  Just a tiny bit longer to bring it together more.

I do love rhubarb – growing up in Nebraska, I’d eat huge fat stalks of it as a kid, fresh from the ground, maybe dipped in sugar.  It grew everywhere there, like a weed.

The last few bits of rhubarb available at the grocery this week left a lot to be desired, but I didn’t want to risk having to wait until next spring to tackle this recipe.  I ended up cutting away a lot of these stalks and throwing them out.

The rhubarb is not cooked in any real way, but it is steeped in a hot syrup made from water, sugar, and vanilla bean.  The recipe suggests you cut up a beet and cook it with the other syrup ingredients in order to imbue the rhubarb with a darker rose color while they are steeping.

This is all brought to a boil and allowed to cook until the sugar is completely dissolved.  The mixture is removed from the heat and the rhubarb pieces are added.  They steep, covered, for about 20 minutes.  This sweetens and softens the rhubarb while also giving them a rosy hue.

The rhubarb is removed with a slotted spoon and allowed to cool on paper towels.  In the meantime, some of the syrup is brought to a boil and reduced further to eventually be drizzled on top of the finished tart.

The baked crust is spread with a layer of filling made from cream cheese, sour cream, sugar, and lemon zest.

On top of that go the cooled rhubarb pieces.  I tried to put the bigger, less-rose-colored pieces on the bottom and the prettier, rosier pieces on top.

Then the rhubarb is drizzled with the reduced syrup (cooled first, of course).

The entire tart is kept cool until serving, at which point I finally removed the tart pan.  Everything stayed together nicely.  Slicing into individual portions was a little tricky, as the rhubarb doesn’t slice along with the rest of the tart.  I ended up having to rearrange the pieces on top of each individual piece.

I really liked this – the crust is like a sugar cookie, the tangy, lemony cream cheese filling complements the sweet-tart syrup-coated rhubarb so well.  It’s a delicious and sophisticated summer dessert.

A few notes:

1. If the dough is crumbly as your trying to form it into a square with the plastic wrap, try processing it a few more pulses in the food processor to combine.  I think this will pay off in the end.
2. Cut the rhubarb in to pieces smaller than the 2″ the MSBH instructs you to do.  They look stunning on the whole tart, but they are impossible to slice through when portioning the tart and are just as impossible to cut through while eating.  My friends and I would just pop the whole 2″ piece in our mouth.  I suppose you could give steak knives to people, but who wants to do that during a dessert course?
3. You’ll have plenty of extra syrup – go ahead and reduce it all and use the extra for drinks and ice cream topping.  It’s very sweet and vanilla-y but with a real hint of rhubarb.  We made all kinds of cocktails with it – it makes a wonderful addition to daiquiris!

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Cherry Frangipane Galette

This thing is fantastic!  A new favorite for me.  A galette is basically a free-form pie and frangipane refers to the rich almond paste that surrounds the cherries in this dessert.  If you have some puff pastry on-hand, this can come together fairly easily.  The most consuming task is pitting the fresh cherries.  Once that’s done, however, this took me about 40 minutes from start to finish and 25 of those minutes were for baking.

The recipe calls for 2 pounds of fresh sweet cherries but I ended up using less than a pound on the actual galette, which I think is a much more realistic amount.  The cherry pitter made quick work of the removing the pits.

I actually pitted these the day before I assembled and baked the galette.  They kept just fine in the fridge.

A portion of puff pastry is rolled out into a large oval.  The MSBH includes instructions for using store-bought puff pastry, if you don’t want to go through the process of making the MSBH version.  (Although the MSBH is soooooo much better than store bought, I highly recommend it.) The MSBH puff pastry rolls out so easily, it’s one of the easiest doughs I’ve ever worked with.

The entire oval is brushed with an egg-cream wash, the edges are folded and sort-of crimped, and then it’s pricked all over with a fork before going into the freezer to firm up.

While it was chilling, I made the frangipane.  Toasted almond sliced, sugar, and salt are pulsed in a food processor until finely ground.

Then butter and egg is added and processed until smooth.  The resulting frangipane is thick, sticky, and smells like buttery, almondy heaven.

This is poured onto the chilled galette pastry and spread evenly.  Then it goes right back into the freezer to chill completely.

Once frozen, the galette is ready for the fresh cherries (nothing needs to be done to prep the cherries other than removing the pits) to be distributed evenly on top.  Now into the oven.

Both the puff pastry and the frangipane puff up and quadruple in height while baking, almost completely engulfing the cherries.  The frangipane falls a bit while cooling but the puff pastry retains its baked shape and the crust forms a proper wall around the galette filling. A liberal dusting of sugar during the last 10 minutes of baking gives the galette that rustic, old-European dessert finish.

The taste reminds of what is just so very, very good about authentic French and Italian baking – simple flaky pastry, buttery almond frangipane, and just the right amount of juicy fruit that adds a bright, concentrated sweetness to balance the lightness of the crust and richness of the filling.  C’est si bon!

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Nectarine Tart

Well this tart is just fancy as can be.  It tastes pretty amazing too.  It’s a major pain to make – one of the more difficult recipes I’ve attempted thus far for sure – but it really is worth it both in taste and appearance.

You start with a baked 9-inch tart shell.  Then you take a bunch of ripe (but not too ripe) nectarines and you slice them fairly thin, leaving the peel on.

Then you make the nectarine “roses” by folding the slices, peel side up, around one another, spiraling from the inside out.  If that doesn’t make any sense, don’t fret because the MSBH has some instructional photos that help you along.  I won’t lie and tell you this process is clean or easy.  It is both messy and difficult.

Each rose is monumentally unruly and hard to keep together, as the slices become slippery and don’t like being curved.  With more handling and time exposed to the air, the slices become more and more slippery and uncooperative.  What’s more is that transferring the finished roses to the tart pan causes them to loosen which means you pretty much have to reassemble them all over again in the tart pan.  And then they loosen again while sitting there with nothing to hold them together.  In other words, this tart is very much an exercise in patience and determination.

I have to admit, however, as troublesome as the nectarine slices were to work with, seeing the roses take shape was very rewarding.  I won’t deny I called few people to declare “I made roses! With nectarines!  And they look just like roses!  Made from nectarines!”

Once the entire pie was filled with the nectarine roses, I wanted a picture looking straight down onto the tart.  My camera lens requires about two feet of distance to take a photo that would capture the whole tart.  I didn’t want to put the pan on the floor, nor did I want to drag out my step-ladder, so I did a series of photos where I would hold the camera up over my head and try to just aim the lens at the tart.  I never got a picture that framed the entire tart, but I love the picture below – I think it’s my favorite picture I’ve taken since I started this project.  I love that my little bookcase is in the shot to the left (it holds all my cooking and baking books) and that the dwindling pile of nectarine slices is documented on the right. I may print this out and hang it in my kitchen, I love it so much!

A filling made from sugar, browned butter (yum!), lemon juice, and brandy is poured over the nectarines and then the tart is baked until set.

The nectarines lose a lot of their bright color while baking, but the rich sweet smell they give off more than makes up for it.  You’d think that a tart this pretty wouldn’t have to taste all that amazing, but this one goes ahead and tastes like a million bucks.  Truly, there’s nothing lacking here: it looks elegant, smells delicious, and tastes like a perfect fruit tart should taste – bright and sweet and lovely in every way.

I served this at an evening dinner with friends and although I tried to snap some photos of the individual slices on plates, without any natural light to work with (the sun had long disappeared by the time we moved on to dessert), none of the photos do the tart justice.  Food and artificial light and photography just don’t mix. But I can report that the tart holds up well when sliced and everyone was very impressed!

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Tarte Tatin

I heard a story on NPR once about the Tatin sisters and how they screwed up an apple pie recipe.  They just went with the flow and figured something out and it became one of the best-loved apple recipes in the world – what is essentially an upside down apple pie.  I think that’s a good approach to life in general – to take a mistake and make something even better  although very difficult for me to implement.  If I had forgotten to put a crust in the pan for the pie before putting it all in the oven, my first inclination upon realizing my mistake would be to crumple to the floor in a pile in anguished disappointment and cry through the afternoon.  But clearly, making a Tarte Tatin is a much healthier response.

This is an awesome dessert.  The MSBH recipe doesn’t call for the cooking of the apples prior to assembling the tarte which really moves things along.  In fact, if you have a disc of pâte brisée hanging out in your freezer and you want some comfort food in not a lot of time, you need only to make this.

First, you make a simple caramel on the stovetop with water, sugar, and lemon juice.  Once it starts to turn golden in color, you have to really watch it because it can get too dark.  I made this mistake the first time I made this recipe and after a half-hour in the oven, the caramel just tasted too burnt to be good.  So now I err on the side of being too light, because the flavor always seems to deepen in the oven.

Butter goes into the caramel and it’s ready for the final two ingredients: the apples and the crust.  Easy-peasy.

I used both Honeycrisp and Macintosh apples, neither of which were ideal but it’s all I had on hand.  The Honeycrisps faired better – the Macintoshes, not so much.  In other attempts I have used different apples and I find Granny Smiths are the absolute best for what’s available in Laramie groceries.  The MSBH recommends Rome or Cortland apples, but I haven’t ever found them here.

The pâte brisée goes on top with its edges tucked in to the pan.  This is a detail the MSBH doesn’t clarify.  I have tried making this with the dough kept out on the edges and then crimped like you would with a regular pie crust and while it was pretty, it just doesn’t work in the end.  Tuck it in.

After baking, I inverted the tarte onto a rimmed baking sheet because the caramel always goes everywhere and your basic platter just cannot handle it.  You can see how differently the two apple varieties baked.  The Honeycrisp apples are light in color and still somewhat firm.  The Macintosh apples are almost completely disintegrated.

Without anything to weigh it down during baking, the crust gets airy and light.  Even after being inverted, it stays puffy and that’s one of my favorite things about this dessert.

I love this with Hagen Daas vanilla ice cream.  The caramel that spreads over the pan will cool and you can chip pieces off and put them on top of the sliced tarte as decoration.  It’s an easy go-to dessert if you have the pie dough already made and the right kind of apples on-hand.  If the pie dough is already made, this recipe takes about 10 minutes of prep and 30 minutes to bake.

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