You Salty Tart: Fresh Plum Tart with Goat Cheese and Walnut-Thyme Streusel

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Salty desserts are all the rage. It seems we're not satisfied anymore with simple sweets, we need them with smokey bacon! and Maldon salt! (And infused with the cereal-milk of our childhood dreams, but I haven't tried that yet.)

This tart isn't a brand-new invention, though—it's from a 2003 Bon Appetit recipe. Anticipating the trend, I guess.

It's a fun, light-feeling dessert, with a nutty crust and fresh, uncooked goat cheese and ricotta filling. If you wait for plums to be in season, you'll get even tastier results. It's quite impressive-looking, and doesn't even require that you make pie crust!


The thing about salt in desserts, though, is that you have to be careful. One minute, you're fun and edgy, but a few pinches of Maldon later, you're serving pretzels with post-dinner coffee. So I've adjusted the salt a little in the recipe below. The sprinkle of Maldon or fleur de sel on top of the streusel is great, but the ricotta filling really didn't need it.


Plum Tart with Goat Cheese and Walnut-Thyme Streusel
Adapted from Bon Appetit

For the crust
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup walnuts (about 2 ounces)
1/4 teaspoon coarse kosher salt
7 tablespoons chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1 egg yolk

For the streusel
1 cup all purpose flour
2/3 cup walnuts (about 3 ounces)
1/3 cup (packed) golden brown sugar
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon coarse kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
1/2 cup (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

Filling and Topping
8 ounces soft fresh goat cheese
8 ounces (1 cup) whole-milk ricotta cheese
3 tablespoons honey
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Pinch of freshly ground black pepper

4 large plums (about 1 pound), halved, pitted, cut into 1/4-inch-thick wedges
1/4 teaspoon fleur de sel (I used Maldon sea salt) for garnish

For crust:
Blend first 4 ingredients in processor until nuts are finely ground. If you don't have a food processor, chop nuts finely and add first 4 ingredients to a large bowl, blending with a pastry blender. Add butter; blend until coarse meal forms. Add egg yolk; blend until moist clumps form. Press dough onto bottom and up sides of 9-inch-diameter tart pan with removable bottom. Cover; chill 1 hour.

For streusel:
Preheat oven to 350°F. Blend flour, walnuts, both sugars, coarse salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom in processor until nuts are finely ground. (or chop nuts and use pastry blender in a large bowl.) Add thyme and blend 5 seconds. Transfer mixture to medium bowl. Add butter. Using fingertips, rub in until small moist clumps form.

Spread streusel mixture on rimmed baking sheet. Bake 8 minutes. Stir, then continue baking until golden brown, about 7 minutes longer. Cool streusel completely (mixture will become crisp).

For filling and topping:
Combine both cheeses, 1 tablespoon honey, 1 tablespoon oil, sugar, nutmeg, and pepper in large bowl; stir to blend well. Refrigerate while baking crust.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line crust with foil; fill with dried beans or pie weights. Bake crust until sides are set, about 15 minutes. Remove foil and beans. Continue to bake crust until golden brown, pressing with back of fork if crust bubbles, about 15 minutes longer. Cool crust completely.

Spread cheese filling in crust. Arrange plums in concentric circles atop filling, leaving 3/4-inch plain border. Sprinkle streusel lightly over tart. Refrigerate tart at least 1 hour and up to 4 hours.

Remove pan sides; place tart on platter. Drizzle with 2 tablespoons honey and 2 tablespoons oil; sprinkle with fleur de sel. Cut tart into wedges.

Lady Marmalade: Blood Orange Marmalade

So, you know how I've been going on and on about winter citrus and its restorative effects on the dying winter soul? Well, let me tell you. I have not been returning the favor--I've had a whole pile of Meyer lemons and blood oranges languishing in my refrigerator for weeks, barely hanging on to this mortal coil. It got to the point where my guilt was so significant that I embarked upon the unthinkable: I decided to make marmalade.

This was An Event for two major reasons:

1. I've never made jam of any sort
2. Despite being half English, I've never really had much of a taste for the stuff.

However! When one is talking wasted citrus, one must rise to the unexpected challenge! Or attempt to, anyway. I'll admit it: it took me a few tries to get this one right. I didn't have a real recipe to work with, and I'd never worked with pectin; I also failed to properly measure the amount of fruit I was using, so I ended up with marmalade soup at the end of the first cooking. Cooking it twice, while probably not ideal, didn't seem to hurt the concoction too much. If anything, I think it may have intensified the citrus flavor.

Things I learned:

• Using only the zest of the orange (discarding the pith and most of the rind) cut the bitterness factor significantly while still allowing the extreme...well...citrusness of the fruit to really shine.
• Marmalade is far more delicious than I'd given it credit for (though, admittedly, my marmalade may not be...well...traditional.)
• Many marmalade recipes call for a metric shedload of sugar. I believe that if you boil longer, you can get a similar effect without as much. I mean, 7 cups? Really?
• Canning and jarring and jamming is nowhere near as daunting as I'd once thought. All you need are a big pot, a pair of tongs, a spatula (for getting the filled jars in and out) and a good book to read while you stir the pot.
  

Blood orange marmalade

8 Whole blood oranges.
3 Meyer lemons, sliced thinly
4c sugar
Pectin (I used one pouch of Certo brand liquid pectin, by Sure-jell)

1. Remove the outer layer of zest from the orange (if you want the marmalade texture, do this with a vegetable peeler; if you're lazy like me, you can use your microplane), taking care not to get too much of the bitter white layer beneath. Set the zest aside.
2. Peel the oranges and then slice them thinly and chop them roughly. remove any tough pith or seeds that you encounter, but save as much of the juice as you can!
3. Put the oranges and lemons in a deep saucepan; add the pectin and let sit for a moment.
   
4. Add the zest.
5. Add the sugar and then bring the contents of the pan up to a boil. Boil, boil, boil away (stirring as much as you can reasonably bear) merrily until it's thick, syrupy, and passes the spoon test.

To preserve your marmalade:

1. Get a bunch of canning jars.
2. Wash them in hot, soapy water
3. Boil them mercilessly for about 15 minutes, then remove them from the pot.
4. Ladle your marmalade into your clean, sterilized jars. Gently seal the tops and boil them at a rollicking, high temperature (with at least 1 inch of water covering them) for 5 more minutes. Turn off the heat, but leave the jars in there until the water is lukewarm (I tend to leave the jars in the waterbath overnight). This should activate the vacuum seal on the jar, characterized by the sort of dip in the middle. If you don't have a vacuum seal by the time the water cools, remove the jar and try again with a new lid.
   

Apple of my eye: Maida Heatter's homemade applesauce

And we're back!

It's funny that after a week of the stomach flu (during with we were sustained only by turkey broth, toast, and Mott's applesauce) I would crave this. But homemade applesauce, like many things, is a completely different animal than the store-bought kind. It's brightened with a touch of lemon and not too much sugar. Chunks of fresh apples have a pleasant texture—a bit of a bite. I used a mixture of local ones from the farmer's market—huge red Romes and some hard green apples whose name I didn't recognize. Today I just used a bit of vanilla extract, but the lovely flecks of real vanilla bean make this superlative. Soon, soon—Shiv and I just made quite a purchase here. (Any suggestions of what sort of trouble we should get into with those? What do you do with a hundred and twenty vanilla beans???)

I copied down this recipe a long time ago from a funny old dessert cookbook my mom has. The pages are yellowed and the spine is broken, so you have to remove a bunch of rubber bands to open the book. I'm not actually sure any of the other recipes still get used, but the applesauce is a staple in my parents' house. I think, though, that tonight's version may be even better than the one I remember from home—perhaps it was the mix of green and red apples, which were particularly flavorful and almost floral in scent. I just ate a second bowl for dessert. (Addition: and a few spoonfuls with cornbread for breakfast.) It's worth making a bunch—applesauce freezes well and is perfect with pork chops or brisket . . . Stay tuned, more to come on that later.


Maida Heatter's Applesauce
12-15 Apples
Juice of one lemon
2 cups water
1/4-1/3 cup sugar
1 each cinnamon stick and vanilla bean
optional pinch nutmeg or mace (I did the nutmeg, not the mace, and added a quick shake of ground cinnamon, too.)

Peel, quarter, and core apples. Place in heavy pot with lemon juice. Slit vanilla bean, scrape, then add pod too. Add cinnamon stick. Add 2 cups water, stir.
Cook covered over medium heat 5-10 minutes until apples begin to soften. Uncover, and with a heavy wooden spatula (or potato masher) stir and break up the apples. Leave some chunks. Continue cooking and mashing until tender but not completely mushy. Add 1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar, stir, taste, add more if needed. Add nutmeg/mace/cinnamon if desired.

The Scent of Fall: Pear and Ginger Crumble

Some Sundays are so perfect—nearly to the point of being painful. It was so warm in the morning that we claimed an outside table at a nearbye cafe, took our sweaters off and sat in tank tops and teeshirts, bare arms drinking in the sun—can it be late October?

After the dog parade I couldn't resist the call of the little Sunday greenmarket, choosing a pile of burnished red Anjou pears and some battered looking yellow Bartletts. To my surprise, the scratched up Barletts peeled beautifully, and were ripe and perfumed, while the Anjous were a little crunchier, and less sweet.

Crumble/crisp was one of the first recipes I learned to improvise on, so usually I make these pretty much from memory. But I'd seen this recipe for Pear Crumble with Crystallized Ginger online, so I started from there, adding a few crushed gingersnaps to the topping and a little vanilla to the fruit. I substituted whole wheat flour for half of the topping flour, and made only a 9 x 9 square crisp (cutting the topping quantities in half.)


Sitting in the late afternoon light, reading the paper while the crisp baked, I was hit with a rush of scent. I am not exaggerating, this crisp might be the single best-smelling creation to have ever graced our kitchen. I had to make myself take it out of the oven—I wanted to bake it all evening, if only the scent could keep going. (Of course, then the handle fell off my oven, and then I was worried that I wouldn't be able to get it out...)

A warm scoop of this at the end of the day after a walk in the West Village and a few slices of John's pizza was pretty wonderful. Though a little dulce de leche on top wouldn't hurt. And I might try to add more of an acidic bite next time—replace half the pears with apples, or add cranberries to the mix. Once it cooled off, the pear-and-vanilla combo was a bit too much like the canned pears of childhood memory. But those didn't smell nearly as good.


Pear Crumble with Crystallized Ginger
Adapted from Bon Appetit (Oct 1998)

For topping
1/4 cup unbleached all purpose flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour (or all white if you prefer)
1/3 cup old-fashioned oats
1/3 cup (packed) muscovado sugar (or brown sugar)
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
pinch teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon minced crystallized ginger
5 gingersnaps, crushed
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces (I microwaved it a minute to soften it.)

For filling
About 3-4 pounds firm but ripe pears, peeled, cored, cut into 1/4-inch-thick slices
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon sugar (we don't like crisp too sweet)
1 tablespoons minced crystallized ginger
1-2 teaspoons unbleached all purpose flour

Preheat oven to 375°F. Butter 9 x 9 baking dish. Mix first 8 ingredients in medium bowl. Add butter and rub in with fingertips or a fork until moist clumps form.

Combine pear slices and lemon juice in baking pan. Add remaining ingredients and toss to blend.

Sprinkle topping over. Bake crumble until pears are tender and topping is golden brown and crisp, about 45 minutes. (Start checking at 30 minutes) Cool at least 10 minutes. Serve warm. (Microwave if it's cooled off—this was not as good at room temperature.)