It's all in the fingertips

by Dan Scharf

Monday October 06, 2008, 10:03 PM

Fall fruits and little tart pans yield tasty results.

An office bake sale happened to coincide with perfectly ripe peaches in the yard and Honeycrisp apples at the farmers market. Armed with my favorite pie dough recipe, some extra butter, sugar, salt, and cardamom, these came together relatively quickly.

First, the dough. There's little I can add to Mr. Pepin's fine take on the subject, linked above, except the sage advice, passed on to me by a coworker, that serves as the title of this post. While the pastry blind baked in a 400 degree oven covered with tin foil (that was weighted with spelt berries that I'd never eat) I prepared the fruit. It would take the short side of 20 minutes for the shells to be ready for filling.

For the apples, they were peeled, roughly diced, and then thrown into a frying pan with some butter. Once the butter was melted I added a bit of salt, some sugar, and a healthy dose of freshly ground cardamom. The fry pan got covered and I let the mix cook, stirring occasionally, until the apples were soft. Then I removed the cover, and cooking and stirring at a relatively high heat until things weren't soupy.

For the peaches it was just a quick peel and rough dice. I didn't have the heart to adulterate them.

After about the tart shells were done with their blind baking I filled them with either the cooked apples or the chopped peaches. Adding caramelized onions to the apple is quite good too, but was not to be on this day. I sprinkled some sugar and a few pieces of butter over the ready to bake tarts before putting them back in the oven to cook until the shells just showed a bit of brown (about 15 more minutes).

They sold fast at the bake sale.

A savory tart is to appear soon on The Cage Free Tomato.