Best of Summer Roundup:Part One, Tarts

Early this morning I peeled apples. Honestly, they'd been peeking out of wooden baskets at the farmer's market for a few weeks, little red harbingers of fall to come, but the heat and humidity made it clear summer was still here, as did the peaches.



And so I'd been resisting the apples, not quite ready for them so long as nectarines, blackberries, plums and melons were all still there. When the basket of tiny crab apples caught my eye though, I suspected that they were one of those blink and they're gone fruits, something I'd have to try now or wait out a year of curiosity for. So I bought them, each no bigger than a small green plum, and then, occupying a sun splash on the floor of my kitchen where the afternoon light is always best, I ate an apple and listened to my increasingly fuzzy cat purr as I stroked her incoming winter coat and knew, fall was here.



So this morning I peeled the remaining crab apples, poached them in lemon and sugar, cinnamon, star anise and fresh nutmeg and fully fell into fall. The scent of these warm apples has crept into every corner of the apartment, making me giddy for crisp nights and crunchy leaves, apple picking in cool orchards, hunting raspberries through dark, dry canes, steamy tea to ward off the morning chill and cocoa in the evening. My backlog of things to blog however is still firmly set in summer, so I am going to feature my five favorite things of summer over the next week or two, a proper summer send off and a clearing of the slate for fall and all the fabulous food to come.



It's probably a cheat to say that one of my favorite summer features is a dessert so fluid and flexible that it is at home in any season, but summer tarts always seem best to me, laden as they are with all the best fresh fruit.



Tarts take on all the intersections and by chance meetings of fruit--that little window of time when summer raspberries fade as blueberries flourish and peaches, small and hesitant but perfectly sweet all meet.



Tarts highlight the beauty of fruit, allowing a peek at the inner striping of a strawberry or the capillary-small flush of red on the orange flesh of a peach. For me, the fresh tumble of fruit on a tart is an illustration of the intention that it has just been made to enjoy in that moment, not to languish in a bakery case encased in sticky-sweet glaze that preserves the fruit and lends a lacquered finish.



This style of fruit tart is my go-to summer dessert. Invite me to a potluck or summer supper and this is what you'll get. A cookie-style crust that takes less than 30 minutes in the oven, a quick pastry cream on the stove and a beautiful array of cold fruit to chop, tarts come together quickly without generating too much heat in the kitchen.



Mini tart are also great for potlucks or informal summer gatherings, tiny little pastries with just a morsel of fresh fruit that you can just pop in your mouth.



Tarts are so endless variable too, even within a subcategory like the fresh fruit tart. One week it might be a cashew cardamom crust with vanilla bean pastry cream and berries, the next it might be a chocolate almond crust with an amaretto pastry cream, like the one above.



Or it could be a dark chocolate cookie crust with a thin layer of lavender-infused chocolate spread across the bottom and a wonderfully contrasting lemon pastry cream with tart kiwi and blueberries spread across the top.



As seasonal as I like stay with tarts, the form often prompts me to reach for striking imported fruit like kiwi or dragon fruit.



For these tarts, ground black sesame seeds stud the crisp crust and a cool key lime mousse fills the inside while fruit is subjected to fondant cutters for the top, cute little cookie-cutterish tools which I never actually use for fondant, reserving them for things that actually, you know, taste good, like dragon fruit.



The other thing that is often great for decorating tarts are little vegetable cutters sold in many Japanese food stores for decorating bentos or adding a flourish to sushi. The cutter I used for the shapes above were from a Joyce Chen set of four different shapes, but I've seen others.



The great variety of tart pans is also fun, like these little rectangular pans, which make a perfect single serving size.



Stone fruit in general probably deserves a post all on its own as one of my favorite things about summer, especially these little black apricots. They were new to me this year, but I promptly fell in love with them. A cross between apricots and plums, these delicate fruit are a perfect melding of sweet and tart like a plum but with the deeper more layered flavor of apricot as well. They're astoundingly good, especially when baked in a tart where their flavor intensifies.



The tarts I made with black apricots might have been my favorite dessert of the whole summer, which accounts for, though doesn't justify, the number of times I made it.



Sometimes paired with plums, sometimes with peaches.



Sometimes with regular apricots, but always in the same puffy sweet almond dough...



...until I figured out that replacing the almond meal with the cornmeal that my dad stone grinds for me at Christmas was equally delicious, if totally different. The mellow sweetness of the corn crust with an intensely sour local plum and floral-scented peach made for an unexpectedly great whole, the kind of dessert that is in perfect harmony with itself in that moment. Perhaps it could be recreated, but that corn, that exact plum, that specific peach, all of exactly those ingredients are what you need to experience it again in just that way.



Like the cornmeal tart with those extraordinary plums, these were tarts that could probably only have been made within the three week span that gooseberries and currants were readily avaliable. I'd only ever done anything with gooseberries once, likewise with red currant (except for decorative purposes) and those experiments were less than successful. Actually, they boarded on the inedible.



This year I felt more prepared, mixing the berries well with agave and spreading the bottom of the fragile puffy pastry crust with a sweet cashew cream to balance out the natural sourness of the berries.



Balance really is the art of the tart. As in this mini tart with its first of the season figs and last of the season berries, the fruit's harmony plays well against the dark chocolate mousse filling in taste and texture, the crumbly pistachio crust picks up the crush of seeds in the black berries and figs, and taken all together it is a perfect tiny package.



While the endless variety possible in tart crusts is lots of fun, sometimes you just need a plain old rolled out pie dough, flaky and light, just a tender shell that won't overwhelm the filling. It's always best to blind bake such a crust before filling it, even if it will return to the oven to bake with the fillings.



Apples might be our own local signs of fall, but the appearance of figs in stores always makes me remember a particular November night in San Francisco when I ate a grilled fig salad and looked out over lights on the water, wishing that every night could be so clear, cool and perfect.



So it makes perfect scene then to draw inspiration from California native and Greens co-founder, Deborah Madison, for this late summer fig tart that starts with a simple crust and is then filled with gorgeous wedges of fresh fig and then topped with an orange blossom custard.



Baked to set the silken-tofu based custard and caramelize the slices of fig on top, this is a great tart to say goodbye to summer with, welcoming fall with open arms and a pleasantly full belly.