Walnut and Buckwheat Caramel Tart - My Little French Kitchen

 
Unfortunately, the place where I live is not that great at picking up signals.  Wifi is a nightmare, with the connection dropping in and out (if it connects at all), so I changed to ADSL.  Also, since the advent of digital television, I have been without SBS.  This has nothing to do with the need to retune my TV - even before the cutover from analogue to digital TV, I could not get SBS on my digital TV.  Someone suggested that I need to shift the TV aerial, but this is not possible when I live in rented accommodation.  Accordingly, for now, I must live without SBS.  In real terms, this means that I must live without their fabulous Thursday night cooking shows.

One of the shows that I did not get to see on SBS was Rachel Khoo's The Little Paris Kitchen.  This is rather sad, because Rachel's books that accompanied the show look charming, and I can only imagine that the show brought the books to life.

However, I did have a stroke of good luck in that I found a copy of Rachel's latest book, My Little French Kitchen, for half price at the bookshop because someone had ripped the dust jacket in one place. Fabulous!  The rip doesn't bother me or affect the useability of the book, so I made the easy decision to take it home.

There are many delicious sounding regional recipes from all over France in My Little French Kitchen, accompanied by beautiful photographs to make your mouth water.  A recipe that immediately caught my eye was for Walnut and Buckwheat Caramel Tart.  I love caramel, and I was intrigued by the use of buckwheat - and I just happened to have half a jar of buckwheat left over from my failed attempt to like buckwheat smoothies.  Accordingly, I bought the remaining ingredients and this tart became the first recipe that I made from My Little French Kitchen - Australian style.

And isn't it a beauty:

The grassiness of the buckwheat is not evident in the flavour of the tart, and the buckwheat serves merely to provide some added crunch.  Walnuts and caramel are a match made in heaven, and the whole kit and kaboodle sits atop a sweet shortcrust base.

You can find the recipe for this tart here.  I won't give you the sweet pastry recipe, because you can use any sweet pastry that you like (or buy a ready made shell), and I personally found this pastry difficult to work with before and after baking.  It is very soft, and I had so much trouble with getting it off the paper once rolled out that in the end, I just scraped it off the paper and pressed it into the tart pan.  Once baked, the pastry seemed rather crumbly.

To toast the buckwheat, you just heat up a frying pan and dry toast the buckwheat in the pan (ie no oil) for around five minutes or until it has turned golden and smells nutty.  And boy, is it a heavenly smell!

The caramel recipe surprised me because you only caramelise half of the sugar, and rest of the sugar is dumped into the caramel with the rest of the filling ingredients all at once.  Do be careful when pouring the other filling ingredients into the hot caramel, as it really does spit angrily, and you don't want a caramel burn on your arm (or anywhere else).

You need a large, sturdy knife to cut the finished tart into pieces, but it is well worth it.  The flavours and textures blend well together, and a slice of this tart is a perfect treat for morning tiffin.