This post may have begun by stressing the speed of making a tart, but you probably wouldn’t be bothering at this if every minute wasn’t a delight. Smell the fresh pears mingling with butter one last time. Stop for a moment and take in the loveliness of your about-to-be-baked dessert. Layer the slices in a spiral one after another into the crust alternately, you can just pile them all in there for a rustic look, or come up with any design you want. To heighten the pear’s flavor, just a squeeze of lemon juice and tablespoon of sugar can be folded in next a couple teaspoons of cornstarch also will help thicken its juice. This will make for arrange-worthy pieces to fan across the shell. Next, try to get even, thin slices from the pears, by arranging them back into halves on a cutting board. But you can feel it slipping off as you zip through each wedge with an (aptly named) paring knife. After peeling and quartering the pears, be sure to remove the coarse inner cores of the fruit along its length unlike apples, this grainy-textured flesh runs all the way up to the stem. Pears are fantastic for making tarts, because their juices don’t run as much as those of fresh peaches, berries, or plums (threatening to spill over the edges, and burn on your oven floor). I find an average 9″ pie pan does the job fine, and often forego rolling out the dough in favor of just patting it down evenly into the pan. Don’t have a tart pan? No problem - neither do I. You can flavor it with an optional spike of vanilla, or cocoa powder to make a chocolate crust delicious also is a tart shell with ground almonds or some other nut, as in this summery hand tart. So go about making the dough as if they’re cookies, beating the butter with sugar, incorporating the egg, and gradually, the flour next. Tarts generally have a richer, sweeter pastry than pies a good comparison is the classic shortbread. It’s easy, and all you need is a few ingredients: three pears, flour, butter, sugar, and one egg. After some hesitation, and thoughts of a crisp, a cobbler, or custard-filled something-or-other, I settled on making a pure and simple tart. The steps were done intermittently, as breakfast was also being made. The Bartlett pears I’d picked up at the market seemed just a bit too firm to eat yesterday I had a houseguest from out of town also, so that was reason enough to speed-soften them as some baked dessert. With juicy pears now in season, I’ve added just a touch of sugar to the fresh fruit, to bring out its ripe flavor against a cookie-like shortbread crust. This recipe will also yield a treat that’s about half the height of an average fruit pie with a top crust, but top it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and I don’t think you’ll hear any complaints. The elegant, refined-looking, open-faced pie - tart - is a holiday crowd-pleaser that requires about half the work. Easy as tart, the saying would be better put.
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