Strawberry Tart (Gluten Free)

When looking in the window of pastry shops, one delicacy that always catches my eye is the fruit tarts.  Traditionally, the fruit tart is a heavenly combination  of shortcrust pastry, crème patisserie and glazed sliced fruit.

The jewel of fruit tarts is the ruby red strawberry tart.  How could anyone resist its luscious beauty?  Accordingly, for a recent work team lunch, I wanted to make a strawberry tart.  The challenge lay in the fact that one of my team members is a coeliac, so the tart had to be gluten free.

The biggest challenge from my point of view would be making the pastry.  After conducting some research, I chose this recipe from Hungry and Fussy for a gluten free shortcrust pastry. It contains almond meal, maize flour, rice flour and sorghum flour.  I substituted the sorghum flour for buckwheat flour, which with a high protein content, I figured would have similar properties to the sorghum flour.  This was my resulting blind baked tart shell:

The pastry tasted reminiscent of Arnotts Shredded Wheatmeal Biscuits.  Whether you think that is good or bad is entirely a matter of personal opinion.

For the filling, I used this recipe from the Australian Women's Weekly.   The crème patisserie is thickened with wheaten cornflour, so I substituted rice flour on a one for one basis.  I was not a huge fan of the resulting crème patisserie, which seemed a little too thick and a little eggy.  My usual crème patisserie recipe, from Dorie Greenspan, only uses four egg yolks - did the extra yolk make a difference?  Also, should I have used less rice flour than cornflour?  Who knows, as I was locked into using the crème patisserie I had made (not wanting to waste all of those egg yolks).

I also layered the strawberries a little differently to the Women's Weekly recipe to make the tart look a little fancier, borrowing from this arrangement from The Great British Bakeoff:

Although not everything went to plan with this tart, I think that the tart looked great and it tasted quite acceptable.

If you would like to make this tart, you will need:

Pastry

¾ cup corn (maize) flour¾ cup sweet rice flour⅓ cup buckwheat flour½ cup pure icing sugar
⅓ cup almond meal
1 egg
125g cold butter, cubed

Place the dry ingredients into a food processor and blitz to combine.  Add the butter and egg and blitz again until a dough forms.

Turn out the dough onto the bench, press into a flat disc and wrap in plastic wrap.  Leave the dough to rest in the fridge for an hour before use.

Spray the inside of a 23cm loose bottomed tart pan with spray oil.

Remove the dough from the fridge and allow to soften on the bench for 10 minutes or so.  Once the dough is able to be rolled without cracking, place the disc of dough between two pieces of baking paper and roll out to fit the tart pan.  Line the tart pan with the dough and allow the tart shell to rest in the fridge for an hour.

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Remove the tart shell from the fridge.  Spray a piece of alfoil on the shiny side with spray oil and place it oiled side down in the tart shell.  Pour uncooked rice or baking beans into the tart shell, and bake for 20 minutes.  Remove the tart shell from the oven, take out the rice and alfoil, then return the tart shell to the oven to bake for another 10 minutes or til completely cooked.  Remove the tart shell from the oven and place on a wire rack in the tine to cool.

Filling

400ml milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

5 egg yolks

1/2 cup sugar

1/3 cup rice flour

Heat the milk in a medium saucepan until it almost boils. Remove from the heat and stir through the vanilla extract.

While the milk is heating, whisk the egg yolks and sugar together in a bowl until  thick and pale. Whisk in the rice flour.

While continuing to whisk the yolks, pour in  quarter of the hot milk.  Add the remainder of the milk to the mixture in a steady stream, whisking all the while.  

Return the mixture to the saucepan and heat, while continuously stirring, until the mixture almost boils and it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.  Remove the mixture from the heat and strain to remove lumps, if necessary.

Assembly

Gently heat 1/4 cup strawberry jam in the microwave and strain to remove the seeds.  Spread the base of the tart shell with jam.

Scrape the crème patisserie into the tart shell and spread out evenly.

Wash, hull and slice a 250g punnet of strawberries.  Arrange the halved strawberries over the top of the tart.  Heat a few tablespoons of quince jelly in the microwave and brush over the top of the strawberries to glaze them.

Place the tart in the fridge for an hour or so to set before serving.