Peaches, beautiful peaches everywhere. How could I resist? The truth is I couldn’t, so I finally had to put the oven on again. It was worth it though – the house was instantly filled with the most beautiful smell of baked fruit and crumbly pastry.
Duncan was hovering over me as I was photographing in a bid to get ‘his slice’ as soon as possible. And he didn’t stop at one! Neither did I. And whatever was left was hoovered up by the guys at our evening yoga class, which is great as having things like that lying around in the house is a dangerous business 🙂 . This fruit tart is a perfect summer dessert. Delicate and ‘buttery’ pastry enclosing a simple filling of succulent peaches and a sprinkle of sugary crumble to absorb all the beautiful juices that the fruit releases during baking. On paper, this size of tart should feed about 8 people, but I don’t reckon you’ll not have very much left if you placed it in front of just four 🙂 . I’m not complimenting myself here, it’s the baked peaches that make it truly irresistible. This tart is as easy as it gets. The only mildly tricky thing to do here is a shortbread crust, but it’s actually not that difficult at all. The key thing is not to overwork the pastry as you don’t want to develop too much gluten in your flour. If this happens your pastry will end up tough and not melt in your mouth delicious, like it should. If lining a tart case with delicate pastry intimidates you, you can always turn it into a nonchalant galette and then the more rustic it looks the better – just make sure you place it on a baking paper-lined tray as the juices will be flowing – a lot! The only other piece of advice I can give you is get yourself a tart case with a loose bottom (not a euphemism) as to get this puppy out of my rubbish tart case took two people and a bit of improvised engineering (read: two knifes, a spatula and a cake serving spoon) and we still didn’t manage to get it out completely intact. An experience that motivated me to stop being tight and finally get a proper tart case. With all this amazing stone fruit at our fingertips, we intend to eat a lot of similar specimens this summer.
90 g / 6 tbsp refined / mild* coconut oil (solid not melted) 200 g / 1¾ cups buckwheat flour 40 g / 4 tbsp cornstarch ½ tsp xanthan gum 2½ tbsp icing sugar (or finely ground sugar) ¼ tsp fine sea salt
FILLING
3-4 ripe but firm peaches 50 g / ¼ cup sugar (I used brown) 1 tbsp all purpose flour 1 tbsp fine semolina or all purpose flour 2 tsp lemon or lime zest 1 vanilla bean, seeds scraped ½ tsp cinnamon 15 g / 1 tbsp refined / mild coconut oil (solid not melted) 2 tbsp chopped pistachios, for decoration (optional)
he pastry is based on an old recipe of mine and the topping is inspired by this recipe.
