food

I've developed a new baking interest, tarts and pies. I tend to have these relatively long cooking & baking eras that revolve around a certain group of food, a method or spesific cooking or baking skills. I've done the sourdough thing, started that in 2018 and it went all the way to starting a microbakery in our tiny Soviet block apartment kitchen, it wasn't sustainable, lol. Then there's been the cake era, fermentation era, laminated dough era, traditional local food era, eras with foods from spesific areas in the world and many more. Now I seem to be very much into tarts and pies, learning all the different forms of shortcrust and other doughs.

I started with French tarts, mostly because they are pretty delicious to me. Today I made a big sheet onion pie, called Tarte à l’Oignon Alsacienne in French. It is basically a French onion soup baked into a pie crust. The crust is very flaky and delicious, a shortcrust called the Pâte Brisée (all-butter-crust) that I made for it yesterday.

Here's the whole thing, it's pretty huge and will feed us for days. It's delicious.

Ate it with a green salad:

Last weekend I made a caramel and chocolate tart to learn making the Pâte Brisée better. It also turned out delicious, but the crust was a bit hard. The one in todays tart is a lot better already. Still a tasty treat:

I also made a classic Quiche Lorraine last weekend for dinner, there is no cheese in the original recipe. It was very good as well.

Plan for next weekend is making a Flan Parisienne and then I'll just make all the tarts and pies that I find interesting until the era runs out of steam. I love that after these I always end up with so many new or better skills and get to kind of travel the world in flavour without going anywhere. Been meaning to make filo pastry pies again for the longest time too, maybe I could tie that into this tart era towards the end. Making a good galaktoboureko has been a plan of mine for years, but I never remember to make it.

Expect a lot of tart posting in the coming months.