Yellow Plum Tart

To me, this kind of simple tart is what french home cooking is all about. It's uses seasonal fruits and simple ingredients to create the perfect summer dessert.

It's also a great way to use up a glut of fruit if you grow your own – or the relatively cheap prices of seasonal stone fruit if you don't. This recipe can be used for any kind of soft fruit or berries. My particular favourite being tarte aux myrtilles, or blueberry tart.

I used pâte sucrée, a kind of sweet shortcrust pastry with high quantities of sugar, and requires a different method to that used for regular shortcrust. The recipe is from the Leith's Baking Bible, and I followed it almost to the letter as they know what they're doing! It looked like it was going to be quite tricky but worked just as they had described so I have written it up here with very few alterations.
 

Things I have learnt from making this tart...

Test the fruit first so that you have an idea of how much sugar to add. These plums were seriously sour and needed a lot more than I expected.

If you are making this tart with the pâte sucrée recipe here, it is likely that the edges will get quite brown by the time the fruit is cooked – I quite like this, but if you don't, I would recommend using plain shortcrust pastry instead.

The fruit will shrink as it cooks so I have upped the amount from 500g (as shown here) to 750g, so won't be gaps between the plums! For berry tarts, around 600g should be about right.

Yellow plum tart: makes one 23cm tart

(The pâte sucrée recipe was adapted from the Leith's Baking Bible cookbook)

170g plain flour
a pinch of salt

85g butter, softened

3 egg yolks
85g sugar

750g yellow plums (weight including stones)

25g golden caster sugar

• Put the flour and salt onto a worktop, creating a circle of flour

• Place the butter, egg yolks and sugar in the middle of the flour and using a pecking motion with your fingertips, mix these three ingredients until completely smooth

• Using a pecking motion with your fingertips, mix these three ingredients until completely smooth

• Scoop the flour over the butter mixture with a palette knife

• Chop the flour into the butter, continuing until there are no patches of flour remaining and the mixture begins to clump together

• Push the pastry into a rectangle, and using a pastry bench scraper to smear the paste onto the work surface repeating until it forms a smooth paste (I did this only twice before it began to look nice and smooth)
• This is called fraisering the pastry – I have absolutely no idea why!
• Shape the pastry into a flat disk, wrap in cling film and chill for about 20mins

• Roll out the pastry to a circle slightly larger than the tart tin
• Line the tin with the pastry, trim off the excess with a sharp knife and chill again for 20mins
• Preheat the oven to 175°C
• Half and stone the plums
• Arrange the plum halves in the tart shell, overlapping to fit them all in, and sprinkle over the sugar
• Bake for 30-40 minutes until the fruit is soft and beginning to brown
• After 15mins check the pastry case – if it's beginning to brown cover the edges with foil before returning to the oven for the remainder of the cooking time

Serve warm or cool, with an optional dollop of crème fraiche