fishitarian

Today I attempted to make berry tarts with custard and also with almond flour crust. I discovered that: all of the above is tasty, even when it falls apart in the oven. So far they have all fallen apart in the oven. I have one last batch to play with, perhaps they will work out.

I started off with a crostata crust recipe and, very hopefully, did a direct substitution of almond flour with regular flour. This did not turn out, the dough, even after several hours refrigerated, wanted to melt all over everything. Not just my hands, but also the room-temperature drinking glass I was using as an ad hoc rolling pin. I had to add a couple of cups of wheat flour before it started behaving like I expected. There is probably some non-wheat flour I could have used if I'd had it on hand to play with; I might try rice flour or something like in the future.

On this occasion, the proportions of my crust were:

3 cups almond flour
2 cups wheat flour
2 tbsp honey
3 sticks butter
3 egg yolks
5 tbsp goat milk

In the future I might also omit the goat milk; it in no way needed the extra moisture. (This might reduce the amount of grain flour needed.)

Then I made custard! And berry mix! I have far more of both than I needed for this amount of crust. In the future I would half the amount I made. The halved amounts would be:

4 egg yolks
³/₈ cup sugar
pinch salt
1 cup heavy cream
³/₄ tbsp corn starch
¹/₄ cup almond flour

1 pkg raspberries
1 pkg blackberries
1 pkg blueberries
1 pinch cinnamon
¹/₄ cup honey

So what I did was mold free-standing tart crusts of varying sizes on wax paper on cookie sheets, ladle in custard and spoon in berries, and bake for about twenty minutes. Twenty minutes would not have been enough if the tarts had held together but since the crust broke and spilled custard all over the cookie sheets, that was inadequate. If the tarts had been in some sort of tart tins they probably would have come out fine. As it is, I am trying something else with the last batch:

I made my free-standing tart crusts, this time on the small end (about three inches across, with roughly half inch bottom and slightly thinner walls (it's hard to keep the walls evenly thick to the top, though ideally they shuold be). They are currently pre-baking for twenty minutes. After they come out of the oven, hardened up a bit, I will add custard and berries and toss them back in for another twenty minutes. I will let you know if they successfully do not break everywhere!

ETA: pre-baked crusts fluffed up so they were not as deep as one might hope. I read something about weighting crusts with dried beans and wax paper; I am not sure how effective that would be in this case, or whether the weight would break the retaining walls. Maybe if I tied the wax paper off so it was a little baggy of weight?

Tarts are three minutes from done, they look much more of a piece this time, though there was some custard spillage. Spillage, though, not breakage!

ETA2: Also I cannot estimate size. These are more like five or six inches acrss. Or the fluff factor worked sideways as well as up. Suspect some of column A, and all of column B.