Kitchen Cycles- Tarte Tatin de Tomates
When a picture says more than a thousand words... over and over.
When a picture does say a thousand words, but I insist on elaborating…
Have I bored you with seasonal kitchen trivia yet? Or have you looked just a bit more closely at what’s happening day by day in your own world? In your own kitchen? in your own garden? In collaboration with the memories on Facebook, I rediscovered, to the day, when I made this one off tomato tart à la the Tatin sisters. But let’s look more closely at this picture and I’ll tell you a few secrets about making it.
First check the date- it was mid-September about eight years ago. I was setting up a TV shoot for ARTE (the European PBS?) and this is what I wrote:
Returning from a speedy visit to one of my nearby Saturday Morning markets (there are 4 within spitting distance), with a basketful of tomatoes, a kilo of cornichons to cure, giant bouquets of chard, and enough duck to to cook tomorrow for the ARTE TV crew shoot. What's on the menu? Confited duck served with figs and honey over a cornmeal cruchade with foie gras croutons, a harvest tarte featuring red peaches, plums and pears, and this tomato tarte that shouts 'au revoir Summer, hello Fall!'
Maybe because I was making pastry for the Harvest Tarte (one of A Gascon Year-September’s on line classes), or fell for the little Roma tomatoes at the market, but this upside down version of my much applauded Tomato Tart just happened. It’s that frenzied creative time that I love in the kitchen that inspires me.
Next - the Tomatoes. Look carefully at these six little Roma sauce tomatoes, cut in half. I left the skins on to help them hold together and salted them. I drizzled a very little bit of honey into the butter in the bottom of the pan to help them caramelize so that their savory juices would run out when baking and mingle with sweet syrup. I placed a big white platter over the tart pan, and carefully flipped it over. The juices ran over and into the pastry and all the caramelized bits created a crisp understory to the jammy tomatoes. Okay, important note on the tomatoes. These are the field Roma tomatoes grown for ketchup and canned sauces. You see the small bushes in fields around here ripening under the hot late summer sun. Grown without irrigation, they are dense and meaty and perfect for this use. dry farming tomatoes is one way they describe this now. choose your tomatoes carefully.
Next- the Pastry. The pastry was my standard pâte brisée (50% butter to 100% flour) rather than a fragile puff pastry. French butter tasted amazing and the extra fat content does makes a different. (Read what Dorie Greenspan wrote about French butter here.) I know this shortcrust pastry and trust it to stay crisp and stand up to the tomatoey juices. Baked in a very hot oven (200’C /425’F). The ragged edges are just tucked down into the tomatoes enough that they make a shallow dish when you turn it out.
I might have cooked some shallots with this, or an onion sliced finely; I can’t really recall and I can’t really see them. But the tomatoes are deep red, jammy ,and on the verge of sweetness anyway, so a splash of vinegar in the caramel and some pungent herbs like thyme or sage wouldn’t go amiss.
So that’s the scoop on looking at this picture. Need more of a recipe than this? The pâte brisée recipe is already here as is the basic tomato tart:
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Next… learn why last night’s mid-September rain is important to the Oyster men of Arcachon.
Tomato Tart highlights on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/18009377941292145/
French Butters: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/17/dining/butter-with-a-pedigree-ah-the-french.html
Autumn Online Classes at Kate Hill Cooks: https://katehillcooks.thinkific.com/bundles/autumn-seasonal-3-month-membership