Feast: shiny, sexy tart
I’m celebrating my love of the food columns and supplements in The Guardian by trying to cook at least one recipe from each issue of Guardian Feast in 2021. Find out a bit more about that here.
Welcome to February folks. Doesn’t your stomach just growl for comfort food and sweet treats? I know mine does. However, cooking during these lockdown days (take 3) can be a challenge. In our family we’re limiting our shopping trips. I’m fortunate to have a pretty well-stocked store cupboard (although readers of previous posts will also note that this project is an opportunity to use out-of-date items lurking dustily in the far recesses of my shelves). Even so, up here in Berwick, ingredients such as ‘meyer lemons’ and ‘cassava’ are not readily available. In fact, this week The Husband did yell: ‘Come on Guardian not everyone lives in London!’.
Despite such minor frustrations, I’m finding that I’m tackling recipes I’d usually not bother with. Looking at the cover pic of Ravneet Gill’s miso caramel and chocolate tart in Guardian Feast Issue No.159, I was salivating.
However, I also thought it looked way too hard for me to tackle – it just had a pastry chef-ish air to it. How wrong could I be? This shiny, sexy, silky, satiny tart with its bran flake crust is SO easy and SO delicious. I was lucky to have white miso in stock (we love Japanese food and use miso in all sorts of things for its umami tang). I didn’t, however, have posh 75% dark chocolate so dusted down a couple of bars of Bourneville.
There were a couple of flashpoints in the recipe… 35ml of caster sugar – should that be 35g? I decided yes. 200g double cream – should that be 200ml? Again, I decided yes. And I see in the updated online recipe (see link below) this has been corrected and I was right. Phew.
I’m always terrified of making caramel. I’m so easily distracted that I’ve burnt goodness knows how many pans of sugar. But the caramel gods were with me on Sunday. And OMG, miso caramel is something I’m going to be making again just for the sheer joy of its taste.
Really, there’s nothing else to say. Ravneet is spot on when she says the tart’s ‘very much on that edge of sweet and salty’. Put simply, it’s full on moreish! Like Ravneet’s family, we finished this superb tart in a day! I think it’s impossible not to.
Ravneet Gill – Miso caramel and chocolate tart
Border Lines 