Fig Tart

When I was a kid I had a story book about a couple of country mice who sneak into town to get a taste of the high life. They broke into a mansion (whose owners had apparently vanished right in the middle of a feast) and dined of all sorts of tasty treats I had never heard of, like Yorkshire pudding and mincemeat pie, and for dessert -- figs!

I had no idea what figs were. The illustrations weren't very good, so for ages I though they were a type of fancy potato chip. When I finally tried fresh figs years later I fell in love with the sticky-sweet fruits. The season is tragically short here, so whenever they're available I buy as many as I can and see what I can do. This recipe for fig tart (along with the crust and frangipane) is from The Purple Foodie.

This is as close as I could get to the vanilla seeds -- they're almost like very, very tiny caviar.

Frangipane is just sort of a generic, sweet almond filling. It can be used with almost any fruit or flavor -- figs, chocolate, even on it's own -- usually in a tart-type pastry.

Bake the tart on the bottom rack of your oven -- the crust is so thin if it's not properly crispy it'll just collapse if you try to pick up a slice.



























Galette pastry crust

1 1/2 cups flour
2-3 tbsp powdered sugar
1 stick cold butter, cut into cubes
1 egg yolk, beaten
Ice water to combine the dough

Mix the sugar and flour together. Blend in the cold butter and the egg yolk with a pastry cutter. It’s faster when you use your hands, but be sure to do this quickly, we don’t want the butter to melt away or we lose the flaky texture. When the mixture looks like coarse breadcrumbs, add the ice cold water, a spoonful at a time, until the dough is just combined. Divide it into two and let it rest in the freezer for 10 minutes.



Vanilla Frangipane

1/3 cup ground almonds
1/3 cup sugar
6 tbsp. butter, softened
1 large egg
1/2 vanilla bean

In a bowl combine together the almonds and sugar, then the butter and egg until everything is pretty homogenous. Split the vanilla bean with a knife and scrape out all the tiny seeds, mixing them in. If you don’t want to use it right away, divide the frangipane into four equal parts, wrap each tightly in plastic. They will keep in the fridge for a couple of days, and up to a month in the freezer.




Fig tart

1 9″ pastry dough
about 10 large figs or about 15 small ones
1/4 the recipe of frangipane above

Preheat the oven to 400F

Roll out your pastry dough to about 10-inch diameter. Prick a fork through it every inch or so apart.

Place the dough on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Spread about 1/4 of the quantity of frangipane on the dough, leaving about 1 inch perimeter around the outer edge of the dough. Slice the figs and place them from outside inwards to form concentric circles to cover the frangipane. You want the figs to over lap some – they’ll shrink down during cooking.

Fold the edges in, pinching a little to make sure they stick. Brush the dough with eggwash and give it a good shower of sugar. Bake for about 45-50 minutes on the bottom rack, or until the pastry edges are golden brown.



August 28, 2011

Lavender Butter

Whenever I see a recipe calling for compound butter it always goes something like, "Take butter. Mix in [ingredient]. Voila!" Rarely do you see instructions calling for butter to be actually made. Making your own butter is really not necessary most of the time, but it's still cool.  I don't do it often because I'm lazy, but it's fun every once in a while.

The mechanics of butter-making are pretty simple -- take cream, shake until it's butter. The cream has tiny, tiny globs of butterfat floating around in it, and when you shake or churn it those little packs burst and stick together, making one big clump of butterfat (and lots of watery buttermilk).

The left picture is before I started shaking, and the right is when the fat is just starting to come together, before I poured off any of the buttermilk. It sort of comes together all at once, getting thicker and thicker until it suddenly congeals into butter.

Lavender Butter

1 pint good quality heavy whipping cream

2 sprigs worth of lavender leaves, finely chopped

Large jar with trustworthy lid

Add the cream and lavender to the jar, filling it up about halfway. Screw on the lid and start shaking. Shake until your arms hurt, rest, shake some more. After fifteen minutes of shaking the cream will start to puff up (this is why you need the large jar), then begin to separate into a clumpy solid and a liquid. Pour out the liquid and shake some more, repeating until no more liquid comes out. Wrap the butter in plastic wrap and keep it in the fridge (no more than a weekish).


September 1, 2011