Monday 19 October 2009

Memories of summer- tomato tarts

So with the nights drawing in, the last of the summer's crop of tomatoes are becoming a bit of a distant memory. I only actually made these simple individual tomato tarts about six weeks ago, but it somehow seems a lot longer than that. These rosada tomatoes were homegrown and quite small but incredibly sweet, and will definitely be grown again. They were halved, mixed with a generous amount of feta cheese (for some reason I'd drawn a blank on what to put with them so thanks to MangoCheeks at Allotment2Kitchen for inspiration) and some torn basil leaves, and piled into some puff pastry 'cases'.
I used ready-rolled Jus Rol puff pastry which has never let me down over several episodes of tart making. Due to a lack of pastry cutter a medium sized bowl served as a template for each round tart, and then a smaller plate to lightly score an inner circle leaving an edge of around half an inch. I pricked this inner area several times with a fork (to stop it rising too much) and then baked the pastry circles for around 10minutes in a medium oven until they were slightly coloured. I'm not sure if this is strictly necessary, but there's nothing worse than raw pastry and as the filling for these tarts didn't really require much cooking, I thought I'd give the cases a head start. Once the pastry had cooled enough to handle I spooned in as much of the filling as I could fit in and returned the tarts to a hot oven for around 15minutes, until the pastry turned golden and the contents were starting to brown on top.
Warming the tomatoes through in the oven seemed to increase their sweetness, and thus the contrast with the salty feta cheese, and with a bit of salad this was a perfect summer dish. I think this could easily work in more autumnal conditions too (as long as you're not a stickler for seasonality) with some steamed vegetables and boiled potatoes. Serving on a retro 1960's plate not essential.

Jus Rol chilled puff pastry sheet
I rate it 9/10
Cost: Around £1.55 for 375g

4 comments:

meemalee said...

Anyone who doesn't use Jus-Rol is a dirty liar :)

TheFastestIndian said...

Too right!

Shaheen said...

The tomato tart looks substantial. Shame all the fresh homegrown tomatoes are gone now.

Thanks for the kind mention, it is really appreciated.

TheFastestIndian said...

Agreed- having ones fresh from the garden makes a real difference!
And no problem about the mention- credit where credit's due!