“Try this one.” “Sookie, I love you, I love your cooking, but I swear if you make me eat one more bite of broccoli tart, I will beat you to death with it.” “Your mother is the pickiest woman I have ever catered for. She has impeccable taste, the highest standards, and she can smell an inferior tart a mile away.”
Ingredients:
For the crust:
½ cup unsalted butter, cubed
1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
¼ tsp salt
¼ cup ice cold water
For the filling:
1 cup milk
3 eggs, beaten
1 ½ cups broccoli, finely chopped
1 shallot, finely chopped
1 tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
½ tsp garlic powder
⅛ cup shredded cheddar cheese
Directions:
Start by making the dough. Place the butter in a small bowl and dust with about ½ tbsp of the flour. Place the butter into the freezer for 1 hour to make sure it’s really cold.
Meanwhile, in a large mixing bowl, combine the rest of the flour and salt.
Add the cold butter to the flour mixture and using your hands, combine until the mixture is just combined. There should still be full chunks of butter.
Add the ice-cold water to the mixture and using your hands or a dough hook if it’s too cold to handle, combine until a shaggy dough forms. It will be crumbly, but you don’t want it to be too wet.
On a lightly floured surface, form your dough into a large ball. Be careful not to overwork the dough. Wrap the dough and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
While the dough chills preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
Prepare the tart filling by whisking together the milk and eggs.
Stir in the broccoli and shallot. Add the salt, pepper, and garlic powder.
Once the dough is chilled, roll out onto a lightly floured surface to ¼ inch thickness.
Using a circular cookie cutter, cut out 12 circles of dough. You may have some leftover to make extra tarts if you’d like.
Lightly grease a muffin tin and place the circles of dough into the wells of the muffin tin. Make sure the dough reaches up the edge of the well.
Fill each crust with the broccoli filling. It won’t rise, so fill it all the way to the top.
Sprinkle the cheddar cheese on top of each tart.
Bake at 400 degrees for 25-30 minutes or until the crusts are golden brown and the filling is firm.
The famous broccoli tarts, or infamous really. Sookie is very adamant that these are tarts, not quiches. However, in researching the difference between a tart and a quiche, the main difference is who is the star ingredient in the filling. If eggs and milk are the star ingredients, it’s a quiche, and if the other ingredients are the star, it’s a tart. Quiches are also always savory where tarts can be savory or sweet. But technically, all quiches are a type of tart. And while this leans on the side of a quiche over a tart, I’ll just tell Sookie to get over it because I made it the way I like it!
Oftentimes when baking something with a crust and a filling- whether a tart, quiche, or pie the question of blind baking comes up. This is a process of baking the crust (usually with uncooked beans or something similar) before adding the filling to bake again. If the crust is relatively thin or the filling is very wet, blind baking is usually necessary. However, blind baking can lead to overbaking the crust if not done right. Because these tarts are so small, I decided not to blind bake the crust and there was not a single soggy bottom in sight.
Happy Cooking from the hollow!
If you missed what I made last episode, catch up here!
