MORE PLEASE - A TIME FOR TARTS

Recipes for Yoghurt and Dill Tart with chilli butter courgettes, Apricot, Honey and Mascarpone Tart and Breakfast Tart (which is really just a simple vegetable tart)

It’s just nice to make a tart sometimes, isn’t it? Let’s start this by defining tarts as opposed to quiches. In my book a tart can be flat, square or round and can, but not always, involve a blind bake. A quiche doesn’t involve a blind bake and tends to be on the deeper end of things.

Because there is often a blind bake involved, tarts can take some time to make. The pastry always benefits from being chilled before blind baking, then it gets properly baked, then you have to factor in some cooling time the other side - it isn’t usually a speedy process. But I was reminded when creating these recipes how methodical and calming it can be. I was also, conversely, reminded of how extreme my perfectionism can get. I learned how to make really good tarts during my months working on the pastry section years ago whilst still a restaurant chef. My sous chef was exacting and frankly quite menacing, so any speck of imperfection meant starting again and dissolving into frantic, anxious tears. I made kilos of pastry, rolled out endless tart cases, chilled, blind baked over and over and over again. I would line my tins the night before (which you can certainly do too) to make sure when I got in in the morning the pastry was beautifully rested and chilled. I became quite competitive with myself always striving for a more beautiful case, a more perfect set, also to avoid the wrath of my sous. When I approached the tart recipes you see today I had to pull myself back a little. There were some hiccups with the testing (see below) and I was downhearted, gutted even, that I had forgotten an art I had so painstakingly mastered.

I remembered though that we aren’t baking tarts for paying customers - we are baking at home. There will always be differences in temperature, ingredients, techniques, and I can’t watch all the people who cook my recipes. And I don’t want to be a bully towards me or my readers like my sous chef was . There has to be room for error. In fact, error and imperfection are important because they encourage learning and develop confidence. Plus they don’t always mean failure, they mean character. And in cooking, character is almost always charming and delicious. So embrace the fact that your tarts might not look the same as mine, they might even look better! Enjoy the process, hone the techniques you learn and most importantly, eat a bloody nice tart at the end.

YOGHURT AND DILL TART WITH CHILLI BUTTER COURGETTES

The idea for this actually came from a breakfast sandwich I made a couple of weekends ago.