Tomato Pasta #6 | Puff Tarts
A recipe to replace shop bought pizza
Beats a pizza
I have the home-cooked pizza bug. I’ve had it for 8 years or so, ever since the emergence of Ooni and Gozney and their portable, not so portable, not at all portable, and even ‘indoors only’ pizza ovens. To my mind, it’s a welcome affliction. My wife seems less enamoured — forever questioning why I have three …
An unbiased overview of the different types of ovens will surely appear on these pages in the future, plus a base dough recipe and a few topping ideas.
For now, though, real talk: while these gadgets can cook a pizza in 90 seconds, there’s a load of forethought and prep that needs to be undertaken in advance of a pizza night. Cooking more than a couple in succession is also quite involved. So while cook-from-scratch pizzas definitely fit into the family and budget friendly theme of this column, they’re not on point in terms of practicality and effort.
Pizzas are reliably crowd-pleasing though. Perhaps they’re a regular quick fix in your house?
The easy weeknight option is to grab an already topped pizza from the fridge or freezer aisles, maybe ‘pimping’ that store bought topping if you think it needs it (it does). However, only one or two brands are actually half decent. So I want to point you towards / remind you of the virtue of using ready-rolled puff pastry to make things that, whisper it, are close enough to pizzas, and also damn tasty in their own right.
Flaky, puffy and (if you get the all-butter variety) genuinely flavoursome, a rectangle of puff pasty = an infinitely customisable base. You can treat it, quite literally, like a pizza, and load it with pulped tomatoes, cheese and whatever else you fancy. Or you can take it in different directions (more on which below).
Add a green salad, some cook from frozen oven fries and you’ve got a low-key dinner sorted with very little effort. Not totally a cook from scratch, UPF free meal. But not a Dominos, either.
One puff tart that never gets rejected in my house, and the one I’ve provided a recipe for below, is a tomato tart. Nothing remarkable about that. But there are a couple of tricks to ensure the end result is not a sloppy, soggy mess (and I’m not sure many tomato tart recipes include these). Moreover, in the case of this particular tart, there’s a layer of creme fraiche laced with olives, anchovy, sun-dried-tomatoes and Parmesan-laced. Umamitown.
Puff tart toppings
Add whatever takes your fancy. Although, personally, I think that before you choose the star element, you should think (/check the cupboard or fridge for) a base layer that will sit between pastry and other ingredients, acting as a binding agent and, often, for necessary succulence.
Consider the following options: