The semester ended two weeks ago, so I have been neck-deep in tarts and... macarons. First time. It was fun, it was terrible, and it pushed my obsessive-compulsive buttons like nothing else. That is probably why I made six batches. I wish I had taken better notes and pictures of the process as I went, but the pastry hustle was too intense for me to step back and record for posterity. I will probably have to make many more macarons to replicate what worked and fully iron out the process. Until then, I will continue to believe that the whole thing was invented by the Free Masons. To fuck with home bakers.
But back to tarts. Yes. Clearly, I am a glutton for punishment. In the past week I made three pâte sucrée tart(let)s and one pâte brisée pie and, would you believe, none were a failure. There was some trepidation, some creative use of foil and a broiler and other pastry MacGyver moments, but really only one do-over required. Even the Giant Bumbleberry Pie From Hell had an amazingly flaky and delicious crust - it just failed in every other respect. I think I'm finally getting the hang of this.
Speaking about revisiting baking traumas, none run as deep as baklava. My father got me hooked on Lebanese-style pistachio baklava early on, and I was probably about 9 years old when my mother let me have a go at making my own. To be clear: I was not a baking prodigy. My baking consisted primarily of using orange juice and marmalade in a yellow cake mix and thinking this was Cordon Bleu material. Something, somewhere, went horribly wrong - if I recall correctly, I used the dregs of an old bottle of lemon juice from concentrate? - and the baklava tasted vile. To have poured so much time, effort, and anticipation into something, only have it fall apart? Sounds a lot like pastry.
I never tried making baklava again. Nine year old Quat didn't have grit. Nor, probably, a growth mindset. (See? I keep up with the pop psychology, too.)
About a month ago, I saw this tart recipe by Salt Sugar Magic and knew it was meant to be. All of the deliciousness, none of the ghee and phyllo layer-by-layer bullshit. Except I'm in the no-honey-in-my-baklava camp. I spent my entire time in Cyprus studiously spurning the local and Greek-style baklava in favor of their Turkish, Lebanese, or Syrian counterparts (συγνώμη). Orange and hazelnuts, apparently an Israeli styling, just didn't feel quite right either.
I now feel brave enough to deviate from a recipe to make it my own on the first try, so why not take my bakewellava tart into familiar territory? I daresay it worked out pretty well. (I should not, however, think I know better than Dorie Greenspan when it comes to making a French classic. But that's another tart for another day.)
While most guests (as far as I can tell) preferred a gussied up pear almond tart, this was my personal favorite. Surprise, surprise: I go for pistachios again.
Lebanese Style Bakewellava Tart
Adapted from: Salt Sugar Magic
Shortcrust pastry (Bouchon Bakery)
Can be made 1 day ahead, or frozen
227g butter, soft
140g icing sugar
375g AP flour
47g almond meal
1 large egg (56g), room temp
pinch salt
optional: 1 t vanilla
Note: the Bouchon cookbook has you combine the ingredients slightly differently, and even perform some amount of fraisage. Truthfully, though, this pastry is fairly robust to mishandling and various butcherings of the order of operations. I've made it in a food processor once and I lived to tell the tale. Just mix the ingredients thoroughly (not your mama's American style pie dough), and give it a chance to rest and chill.
Sift the flours and salt together. In a stand mixer, cream the butter about 1 minute then add the icing sugar and continue creaming until light and fluffy, 1 more minute. Mix in the flours on medium, followed by the egg. Mix until fully combined. For good measure, use a spatula to smear the mixture on the sides of the bowl (fraisage? I guess) to ensure that no lumps of butter or flour remain.
Separate into two disks, about 400g each. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. You'll only need one for a 9" tart pan, but backups never hurt (see: the Lemon Coconut Bakewell problems). You can refrigerate or freeze the dough at this stage (plan on a few hours in the refrigerator to thaw. Flatten the disk of dough between two sheets of parchment - as needed, whack it with a rolling pin or leave it at room temperature for a few minutes until it relaxes. The dough should not crack when rolled, nor should it stick: you should not need to dust it with much flour to prevent sticking (if it does, pop it in the freezer for a minute or two). Save that parchment for blind-baking and packing in the filling!
Roll into a circle approximately 11" in diameter and fit into a 9" tart pan. Be sure to push the crust into the edges and corners, but avoid stretching it too thin. This dough is fairly robust to patchwork attempts, and will tolerate being pressed into the tin. Roll the rolling pin over the rim of the tart pan to remove the excess dough. Save the excess dough to repair any small cracks that occur during/after blind baking. DO NOT bake yourself a congratulatory mini tart / midnight snack with the scraps before your proverbial chickens have hatched, ahem, or you'll be improvising "shortcrust putty" the next day.
Dock the base of the pastry case with a fork and pop into the freezer for 30 minutes, or overnight.
Preheat the oven to the 350F. Blind bake for a total of about 25 minutes. Even from frozen, I blind-bake with weights and parchment for the first 15 minutes, and continue baking without weights for another 5-10 minutes. The goal is a slight golden hue, as this crust will return to the oven for quite some time with all the filling. Small amounts of raw pastry can be used to patch small crusts - they'll bake with the filling later on.
Let cool to room temperature while you work on the syrup, filling, or... three other kinds of tarts and pies? Cardio?
Sugar syrup
Can be made 1 day ahead 150 ml water
300g granulated sugar
1 Tbsp lemon juice
(optional: 40g honey or corn syrup)
(optional: 1 stick cinnamon, 3 whole cloves)
1/2 t each orange blossom and rose water (or to taste)
Bring the water, sugar, and lemon juice (+ honey or corn syrup, if using) to a boil in a small saucepan, then simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally with a silicone spatula - about 10 minutes. The desired consistency is that of a thin syrup, closer to maple syrup than honey in texture: if you have a candy thermometer, you want to aim for about 220F. Let cool slightly before adding the blossom waters to taste and removing any whole spices. You will use about 1/3-1/2 cup to bind the nut filling, below. Save the rest for presentation and serving.
Note: You can - and most people do - start with equal parts sugar and water and cook this down to the desired consistency. When the syrup reaches the right temperature, it will also have the sugar concentration you are after (yay science). If you walk away and over-reduce your syrup and it refuses to pour, add water and do it again! The use of lemon juice or invert sugars is intended to help keep this syrup liquid (i.e., not crystallized) as it cools more than to impart flavor.
Nut filling
120g finely... or roughly... chopped walnuts
120g chopped pistachios (see above) + some extra for garnish
50g granulated sugar
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 to 1/4 tsp ground cloves
pinch salt
(about 1/3 c of the sugar syrup, see above)
Note: My food processor is horribly inconsistent, and produces lots of fine nut meal in the process of achieving rather inconsistently chopped nuts. I ended up using much more than 120g of each type of nut to get the size I wanted. Working in two separate batches for each type of nut, I still had to sift them first in a pasta strainer (to get the chunky bits that needed to be processed further or reserved for garnish), then in a fine mesh strainer (to remove the fine meal). Conveniently, you know what uses up finely ground nut meal? See below.
Mix the nuts, sugar, salt, and spices thoroughly. Drizzle in just enough of the sugar syrup so that the nuts bind together easily, without being soggy. Spread the nut mixture into the blind-baked and cooled pastry case. Lay a sheet of parchment paper over the nut mixture and use your hands or a flat-bottomed tumbler or measuring cup to press and pack in the nuts densely and uniformly across the entire base of the tart, being careful not to damage the pastry edges. You may have a small amount of nut filling left over. I don't need to tell you what to do with it, do I?
Pistachio-almond cream (frangipane, in the British sense of the word)
Can be made 1 day ahead or frozen 113g (1 stick) unsalted butter, soft
115g granulated sugar
115g almond/pistachio flour blend (me: about 50-50; all pistachio would have been delicious too)
1 Tbsp AP flour
2 large eggs, beaten
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
pinch ground clove
pinch salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp each orange blossom water, rose water (or to taste)
Note: For a rustic look, I usually like to make my frangipane with a mix of home-ground slivered almonds (skin still on) and bought blanched almond flour. If grinding your own nut meal, pulse the nuts with an equal weight of sugar to absorb the oils and avoid making nut butter - the frangipane won't mind if you have to cream the butter with less sugar later on. Here, I used about half store-bought almond and pistachio flours and half homemade meals of each nut (see notes on the filling). The added flour helps with the fact that home-ground nut meals are slightly coarser and oilier than blanched nut flours. This would be pretty awesome with just pistachio meal, too.
Note #2: In pistachio-centric recipes (see also: Mafroukeh), I like just enough orange blossom and rose waters to enhance the pistachio flavor, but not so much that most people would be able to distinguish the floral notes as individual entities. You can get most likely get away with more if you want to really hammer home the flavors of the Levant.
Combine the nut flours/meals, salt, and spices. In a stand mixer or with a hand mixer, cream the butter and sugar (if not used to grind nut meal) until fluffy. Add the nut blend then the eggs one at a time. Finish with the extract and blossom waters. Transfer to a piping bag and refrigerate until ready to use. You may need to give the bag a few minutes at room temperature, or knead it gently with your hands, to return the nut cream to an easy piping consistency. Avoid letting it get so warm that butter starts to separate: just refrigerate again if this happens.
Pipe and/or spread the pistachio-almond cream over the compacted nut filling. The filling will smooth itself out as it bakes, but also puff up somewhat, so make sure you do not overfill. The nut cream should be at least 2 mm lower than the edge of the blind-baked pastry case to minimize the risk of overflow. (I knew I overfilled so I anxiously watched this tart as it baked...)
What does one do with leftover nut cream/frangipane? It freezes well, but small amounts can be baked on a scrap of parchment paper (10-15 minutes @ 350?) for lovely crispy cookie. Or you can pipe the stuff straight into your mouth, raw. Mmmm buttery memories of the Eastern Mediterranean. DON'T JUDGE.
Bake at 350 for approximately 40-45 minutes, or until the edges of the nut cream are golden brown and the filling in the center is just set: it should bounce back when pressed with a finger. Peek around 25 minutes in to check the crust and rotate the pan, as needed: if the edges of the pastry and nut cream are browning too quickly relative to the center , cover them loosely with a makeshift pie shield. (I probably should have, but didn't so my edges are a touch dark.)
Allow to cool completely before serving. Brush with the reserved syrup, sprinkle some nuts. Save some extra syrup for drizzling onto the plates.
I should have held all the dinner party guests hostage while I made Nate take better pictures of the inside of the tart. Instagram before real life, right?