gooseberry tart

It´s not like I´ve taken an oath to produce tart tarts solely from now on, I promise you this was only a coincidence. I craved something summery for my afternoon tea but didn´t have any other summer fruit but a litre of red gooseberries in the freezer. I have been looking for a recipe to use them for quite a time now, but I couldn´t really find anything that appealed to me. When searching in my Hungarian cookbooks I found a sauce that goes well with rich steaks and the Swedish cookbooks "promoted"recipes for stewed gooseberry purée served with milk for breakfast. I found a recipe for clafoutis in Nigella´s How To Be A Domestic Goddess but I craved something more substantial so I decided to make a tart.



I made a shortcrust pastry with

300ml of flour

1 egg

1 tbs sugar and

150g butter

Let rest in the fridge for about 1 hour. I knew about the gooseberry elderflower combination but I wanted to try something new, so I surfed the web in English, Swedish and Hungarian but found very little. There was a recipe where cinnamon was used, then another one with lemon zest but then that was about it. I decided to use Nigella´s idea from her clafoutis recipe (the orange flower water) and the lemon zest, just because I absolutely love the flavour.

I baked the pastry shell for 15 minutes on 225C degrees then filled it with the

gooseberries (1 litre)

sprinkled 100ml sugar

1 tbs potato starch

some vanilla sugar

few sprinklings of lemon zest and

1 tbs of orange flower water over the fruit.

(You could also stew the fruit first by crushing the gooseberries and cook i´t with the other ingredients for a few minutes) but I like a bit texture, so I just used the raw fruit.)

I baked it for another 25 minutes and served it with Greek yogurt (yes, I know, I use Greek yogurt to everything but it actually went very well with this tart). You can serve it with cream, custard or like Delia Smith, with a nice elderflower ice cream.

Note: I couldn´t wait for the tart to cool completely but I would advise you to make your very best and wait, because my second slice tasted so much better! It really makes a difference. The tart was perfectly sweet-and-sour, if you like rhubarb you will love gooseberries. I couldn´t taste the orange flower water at all but the lemon zest complemented the gooseberries perfectly. This time I only used 1 tbs of orange flower water as I didn´t want my tart to taste soapy, but I´ll might give it another try with at least 2 tsp next time. Also I can imagine using orange zest, it should be delicious.

I made myself a nice cup of tea on my new PG loose tea that I bought yesterday at the English shop and I was happy and contented for the rest of my Sunday afternoon :)