Broccoli and blue cheese tart (no fuss)

Today I made something terrible. So terrible I’ve already eaten 1/3 of it. That’s the most terrible thing about it: I just keep cutting myself a little piece, a tiny little piece. Then it dawns on me that I’ve had four of those little pieces and nearly half the tart is gone.

I don’t know what kind of willpower it takes to resist. No point going on about it: to my primitive palate, this tart is disgustingly good.

Generally I prefer savoury tarts to sweet ones. I like most of them, actually. I don’t know what you’d have to put on one for it not to tempt me. Today’s is something of an experiment. I’ve never made this particular one before. Originally I was thinking of a plain broccoli tart. Then I remembered that a friend who’d come over for a breakfast meeting had brought a packet of bacon we hadn’t used in the scrambled eggs (absolute sacrilege), because he “doesn’t eat meat on Tuesdays” (sick, right?).

So there I was with bacon, and I thought I’d make a classic broccoli and bacon tart. On the other hand, how ordinary is that? It needed something extra. Like what? A bit of blue cheese, of course. There you have it: the entire thought process of a primitive bloke in the kitchen.

As you already know, the result satisfied my palate (1/3 gone in 20 minutes, and even that’s stretching it), though not necessarily my mind (which can’t come to terms with its own weakness and will certainly spend more than 20 minutes thinking about it, but they say thinking burns the most calories). Call it almost a draw, but definitely no walkover, as it might have seemed at first.

Oh, I nearly forgot. I also found a little poem by three-and-a-half-year-old Nadka from Listvyanka in the Irkutsk region. It goes like this (a loose translation):

„Когда пришло сильные морозы

Байкал ушел толстый лед

Так что не едим сегодня омуль

Пирог с заварным кремом только с голубым сыром.”

As you can see, the child hasn’t learned what rhymes are yet, but I think we can forgive her, can’t we? It sounds a bit better in the (loose) Polish translation.

“When the bitter frosts set in,

Thick ice covered Lake Baikal.

So no omul fish for us today,

Just a tart with cheese of blue.”

Speaking of Baikal, I should mention that in “two thousand and what’s-its-name” (that Kazik Staszewski quote just popped into my head) I spent a good couple of weeks by the lake. It was a pretty intense fortnight, and once again I discovered just how friendly people in Russia can be. I’ve found that more than once on my trips there, and by a conservative estimate I’ve spent a good few months in Russia (a month studying in Moscow, time in St Petersburg, countless trips on the Trans-Siberian Railway, exploring Siberia, and so on).

Nobody offered us broccoli tart at Lake Baikal, admittedly, but people showered us with all sorts of things. One fisherman even caught an omul especially for us and cooked it beautifully.

I could tell stories all day. Back down to earth. Here’s my broccoli and blue cheese tart. Of course I recommend it!

At a glance: 

Prep time: 30 minutes

Baking time: 40 minutes

Oven temperature: 190 degrees Celsius

Serves: heh, probably enough for four

Calories: according to the wrapper, 100 grams of butter has 753 kilocalories. There are 150 grams of butter here, so the butter alone contributes about 1150 kilocalories. Add the cream, eggs, bacon… That little tart easily packs about 3000 all told.

Ingredients for a savoury tart:

For the pastry

• 150 grams of butter
• a cup of wheat flour
• 4–5 tablespoons of cold water

       For the good stuff, i.e. what goes inside

• Broccoli (one head)
• 3 hen’s eggs
• 150 millilitres of 18% fat cream
• 4 rashers of smoked bacon
• a leek (the light green part, a piece about 8 centimetres long)
• 100 grams of mature blue cheese (I used a pack of Président Bleu d’Auvergne, but blue Lazur will be just as good)
• 1 medium white onion (the completely white kind, but an ordinary onion will do)
• a teaspoon of ground black pepper
• a teaspoon of ground nutmeg
• a teaspoon of salt

Method (a little kneading, frying, mixing and baking — a bit of everything):

This is a simple pastry, with no long-winded rituals and no blind baking. Naturally I started by making it. I cut 150 grams of butter into thin strips and tipped them into my enormous bowl. I added a cup of wheat flour and a pinch of salt and worked it all together by hand. Once I had a fairly crumbly dough, I added 4 tablespoons of water (tap water) and worked it again. You get a smooth but very buttery dough. I shaped it into a ball and put it in the freezer.

I trimmed the broccoli, cut off just the florets and boiled them in lightly salted water (not too long, about 7 minutes). While the broccoli was cooking, I chopped the onion and bacon and fried them briefly in olive oil. By then the broccoli was cooked, so I drained it.

Next I put the fried onion and bacon into a deep bowl and added the cream and eggs. I mixed everything thoroughly, added the seasonings (pepper, salt and nutmeg) and mixed again. In went the finely chopped raw leek and the crumbled blue cheese. Another stir. Finally I added the cooked broccoli and mixed it all once more.

I took the dough out of the freezer (careful it doesn’t freeze solid) and rolled it out. I don’t have a big rolling pin, so it came out a bit uneven. I put part of the pastry in the tart tin and used the rest to patch the gaps until the whole tin was evenly lined. I pricked the pastry with a fork and put it back in the freezer in its tin for 5 minutes. Meanwhile I preheated the oven to 190 degrees Celsius.

After 5 minutes I took the tin out of the freezer and spread the broccoli and cheese filling evenly over the pastry (you can see what it looked like before and after baking in the photos below). I put it in the oven and baked it for about 40–45 minutes. Done. Enjoy!