It’s midsummer, and it’s fruit season. Luscious, juicy, ripe, sugary fruit. Right now, peaches and blueberries are everywhere, and other than eating them by the bowl- or handful, we can also turn them into the most decadent desserts. The two flavors pair up wonderfully well. I happened to have had some peaches at home from the farmer’s market, and a pint of blueberries in the fridge that I needed to take care of. Coincidence? I think the fruit fairies had it all planned out from the start.
I started looking around for recipes for fruit cobblers, but nothing I came up with really appealed to me. I wanted something not too cake-y, a little bit crunchy, and mostly fruit. It occurred to me I was looking for the wrong thing, and switched to crumbles instead of cobblers. Success! The topping for a crumble is just the right combination of sweet and crispy, somewhat akin to granola (but softer), and exactly what I wanted. After a little bit of looking around, I found just the right thing at FineCooking.com. What follows is based on their recipe, which I’ve adapted a bit. Serve it warm with a little bit of ice cream (like the plum ice cream I recently made) for a dessert you’ll be dreaming about for days.
Call it a midsummer night’s dream, if you will.
Puck
Peach and Blueberry Crumble
Fruit Filling
4 peaches
1 pint blueberries
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 Tbsp corn starch
2 tsp freshly grated ginger
Topping
1 cup flour
1 stick butter (room temperature)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
A pinch of salt
1 cup old-fashioned oats
First, plunge the peaches in boiling water for about a minute.
Next, place the peaches in an ice bath. This will make the skins easy to remove.
The skins will slip right off. You can now slice the peaches.
Mix the flour, sugars, salt and butter with your hands until the mixture resembles coarse bread crumbs.
Incorporate the oats. Refrigerate until ready to use.
Ginger and lemon, the secret weapons for this recipe.
Blend the corn starch in the lemon juice and add the ginger.
Mix the fruit and lemon mixture together in an oven-proof dish.
Spread one half of the topping on the fruit and bake in preheated 375F oven for 20 min. Add the remaining topping and bake for an additional 15 to 20 min.
A perfect summer dessert
Serve with some ice cream and thank the dessert fairies.
Years ago, my sister Brigitte was married to an Iranian man. She met him in Paris, where he still lives, but most of his family lived in Tehran. These were the early days of the Islamic Revolution, and they certainly were not very good times for Ali’s family, yet a few of them somehow managed to get in and out of the country for annual trips to Paris. I was only a teenager at the time, but I do remember those visits from some of Ali’s siblings, as they were always a time for some exotic fun. They always brought with them some goodies from back home, such as large bags of pistachios, the occasional jar of caviar (the best I’ve had to date), and some homemade pickled eggplants. The latter were a particular favorite of my mother’s, who would have to exercise great restraint in order not to eat an entire container in one sitting.
Torshi, as pickles are called in Farsi, are meant to be eaten alongside a meal, much as Indian chutneys or French cornichons are, and their tangy goodness is a great complement to many dishes. They can be made with a variety of vegetables. Brigitte is very fond of garlic pickles (seer torshi), which can and should be kept for many years, as they only keep getting better as time passes. She recently told me she had tasted some that was over twenty years old, and that it was truly delectable. As she says, if we make some now, we could enjoy it in retirement. How’s that for meal planning? I’m tempted, actually.
To make today’s torshi, choose very small bademjan (eggplants), such as fairytale eggplants, or baby purple ones. The few recipes I’ve seen out there call for dried herbs, but Ali’s mother’s recipe uses fresh herbs, and there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that they are what makes this condiment so special. So if you go ahead and make this – as I hope you will, because it’s really dynamite – don’t take any shortcuts; you would deprive yourself needlessly. The hardest spices to procure are golpar (ground angelica) and sumac, but fortunately, we live in an Internet age where nothing’s impossible; and once you have those in your spice pantry, you can use them for other easy to prepare, middle eastern dishes. Sumac is delicious sprinkled on plain white rice.
Fresh herbs really do make a difference.
My sister gave me her recipe in a typical French way, which is to say without any quantities. She and many other French cooks do things this way, “au feeling,” which is a wonderful non-method that requires using your better judgment. In France, people will often tell you things like “n’en mets pas trop” (don’t put too much) or “tu vois bien” (see?), which assumes that the listener has enough knowledge and/or experience to figure out on his or her own how much is enough. I know that my American friends tend to be somewhat intimidated by this, and so I share this recipe with you with some additional details. Please feel free to use your own instincts (as I did) as you go along. This is a good place to try, as the recipe is quite forgiving and nothing can go terribly wrong.
Nush-e jan!
Torshi e Bademjan Pickled Eggplants
1 lb baby or fairytale eggplants, green top trimmed
1 qt apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup each tarragon, mint, cilantro, parsley – finely chopped
1 Tbs each chopped rosemary and chives
2 or 3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp each sumac and golpar
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
2 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp fleur de sel (or sea salt)
Bring vinegar to a boil, and simmer whole eggplants in it for 5 min. Turn off heat, remove eggplants and set vinegar aside. Let cool. Meanwhile, chop and combine herbs, garlic, and spices (except coriander seeds) together in a bowl. Make a deep slit along the length of the cooled eggplants, and stuff with herb mixture. Place in a container, cover with vinegar, sprinkle with coriander seeds and salt, and close container. Refrigerate. They will be ready to eat in about 2 months or so. The longer you wait, the better!
Make sure you pick tiny eggplants for this recipe.
They already look good. Now they're ready to be covered in vinegar and put in the fridge for a 2-month nap.
Serve as a condiment alongside kebabs and rice, or any middle eastern dish.
Summer is here, and it has been inspiring me to cook with fruit. Lots of them. I’ve been (very) busy with plums, peaches and blueberries. As I was trying to decide what fruity dessert I should bring to our friends’ barbecue recently, I settled on raspberries as the winner for this lottery.
I wanted to make a fruit tart, that lovely French assemblage of a cookie-like crust, pastry cream, and glossy fruit. The crust and cream are already quite sweet, and so the choice of topping must be made carefully. Any kind of berry works well, because they are inherently tangy. Raspberries are abundant right now, and happen to be my favorite (in a tie with a perfectly ripe strawberry).
This should have been (are your speakers on?):
Thank you, MC.
Yes. Making this tart turned out to be slightly more complicated than I had originally bargained for. Now, I will admit to not being a baker – I have a hard time following exact directions, which great baking requires, so I tend to stay away from complex pastries – but I really thought this would be a no-brainer. Ha!
Let us begin with the crust. There are a few basic types of pie crusts out there: pâte brisée, pâte sucrée, and pâte sablée. I’m leaving out pâte feuilletée (puff pastry) from the lot, because its preparation and use are quite separate from the rest. Pâte brisée is the crust typically used for making quiches and other savory or sweet pies. It’s primarily composed of flour, some type of fat, and water (I have a good recipe here). Both pâte sucrée and pâte sablée contain eggs and sugar, but differ in their making: in pâte sucrée, the butter is creamed with the sugar and eggs before being incorporated with the flour; in pâte sablée, the butter is incorporated to the flour by rubbing both together until the mixture resembles bread crumbs or sand (sable means sand in French), and then adding the sugar and eggs. Pâte sablée crumbles a little more readily, and it is that cookie-like texture that I was after for my tart.
I looked at a number of recipes before settling on one which promised success because it was “tested” and therefore presumably fail-proof (right? Right?). The amount of sugar in the dough (1/4 cup for 1.5 cup of flour) should have given me pause, but heck, I’m a kitchen warrior, and nothing really scares me. Well, gentle reader, it should have. Not only is that amount of sugar a guarantee that you will never be able to roll out that sticky mess of a dough, no matter how long you let it sit in the fridge, it is also a guarantee that, once you have somehow managed to mold it inside your &%$! tart pan (and I measure my words), the sides will collapse in the heat of the oven, like a sand castle on the beach at high tide, leaving you with nothing more than a fat cookie. Curses.
Take two. This time, it’s for real. I found a recipe that called for minimal sugar and lemon zest – a winner right out of the gate, since lemon and raspberries complement each other very well. It was not the easiest dough to handle, but it was at least manageable, and easy to patch together in the places where it tore, because it’s very soft. Since the filling for the tart is prepared separately, the crust must be blind-baked, that is, cooked without a filling. This is done by placing parchment paper with pie weights (or beans) in the pan on top of the crust before putting it in the oven to bake. Once the crust is baked and cooled, it can be filled – in this case, with pastry cream and fruit.
On to the pastry cream, for which I trusted none other than Julia Child. Her crème patissière is classically made, with creamed sugar and eggs, hot milk and flour, and cooked for a few minutes to get rid of the raw flour taste. It holds itself together quite well (you need something with a lot of body in a fruit tart, so the filling doesn’t fall apart when you cut out the first slice). I flavored it with amaretto, which I think is one of the best flavor companions to raspberries. My only gripe with the recipe is that it is too sweet. The next time, I will reduce the amount of sugar from 1 cup to 3/4 cup, which should still be plenty enough – I might have to increase the amount of flour slightly, to compensate for the loss.
The last thing to do is placing the fruit on top of the pastry cream-filled crust: a simple task, made only slightly more challenging by the final brushing with a liquid jam glaze, which requires a light and nimble hand, in order to preserve those delicate raspberries.
In the end, while it was more of a challenge than I anticipated, I am still pleased with the result:
What do you think?
Raspberry Tart
For the crust:
1 3/4 cup flour
10 Tbsp cold butter (cut in 10 pieces)
1 to 2 Tbsp sugar (just remember: the more you use, the harder the dough is to handle)
a pinch of salt
1 large egg (or two egg yolks)
1 Tbsp water
zest of one lemon
1 Tbsp fruit jam (apricot, raspberry or plum work well)
For the crème patissière
2 cups milk
5 egg yolks
1 cup sugar (see blog note)
1/2 cup flour (see blog note)
2 Tbsp amaretto (or 2 tsp vanilla extract)
1 Tbsp butter
For the topping
1 pint fresh raspberries (you cannot really use frozen for this recipe)
2 to 3 Tbsp apricot, raspberry or other fruit jam (I used plum)
Step 1, the crème patissière: ideally, you will make this the day before – or at least, the morning of. First, bring the milk to a boil. While you do this, beat the egg yolks and the sugar on high speed until the mixture turns a pale yellow and the sugar is no longer visible. Very slowly beat the hot milk into the egg mixture – add only a trickle of milk at first, more as you progress. You are trying to warm up the eggs without cooking them. This is called tempering.
Beat in the flour and flavoring, then pour back in the pan and return to the stove. Bring back to a boil, stirring the entire time; you need to make sure the crème is not scorching at the bottom. Boil for about 3 minutes, mixing constantly. The crème will be thick like pudding; it will thicken even more as it cools. While still hot, mix in the butter. Place in a container and cover with a plastic film to prevent the formation of a skin. When cool, refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight.
A very thick custard, amaretto-flavored
Step 2, the dough: in a food processor, pulse together flour, salt and butter. When blended, add sugar and lemon zest, and pulse for a few seconds. Add egg and water, and process until the dough comes together in a ball (about 30 sec.). Gather into a ball and flatten in a disk shape. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for about 30 min.
Ready to go rest in the fridge
Roll the dough out on a well-floured surface, and place in an 8- to 9-inch tart pan with a removable bottom. If the dough tears, as will likely happen, just patch it up with leftover bits. It will still come out pretty in the end. Put the dough back in the fridge for about 15 minutes. During this time, preheat your oven to F375.
Before baking, do the following: prick the bottom of the crust with a fork, to prevent bubbling, like this:
These little holes will prevent the dough from puffing up as it bakes.
Next, place a sheet of parchment paper, filled with pie weights or beans, on the crust. Place your tart pan on a cookie sheet (this will make it easier to take in and out) and into the oven. Bake for about 15 min. with the pie weights, then remove those and bake for an additional 8 min. or so, until the crust is done (the sides with have turned color).
When the crust is cool, brush the bottom with a little bit of fruit jam, to seal it. This way, it will not turn soggy when you put the filling in.
I used plum jam for this application.
Step 3, assembling the tart: spread the crème patissière on the tart crust. Place raspberries on the filling in concentric circles, like this:
No need to push the berries in the filling; just put them gently down.
Warm up the jam for a few seconds in the microwave to liquefy it. Then gently brush it on the berries to give them that glossy, pastry shop finish. A few mint leaves in the center for a little color contrast, and you’re done!
Shiny berries on crème patissière laced with amaretto on top of a sweet, lemon-favored crust; not a bad day at the office.
