Tarte aux tomates, prosciutto et feta
This is the easiest special treat I like to make for friends and family. The recent post on this by David Lebovitz inspired me the other day to make this for my dad and uncle. It looks classy, and tastes like a heaven for which you would pay dearly in a restaurant.
What makes this such a fantastic recipe is that its versatility allows it to be modified for any diet. A tonne of my friends are vegan/vegetarian, so I am perpetually on the hunt for recipes that are easy to make for them at our dinners.
Traditional tomato tarts are made with Swiss-tasting cheeses, such as Edam and Gruyere, as well as with bacon/ham bits. Myself, preferring healthy options, like the choice of goat cheese, feta, maybe even bocconcini. In France, with the fantastic whole wheat & seed flours available at every grocery store, the crusts give a completely different taste than the bland flours stocked here, but we made do with what we have.
One way it’s the easiest thing ever is that you can just go out and buy the pie crust from any frozen section, already in an aluminum baking tin. Since people (LIKE ROBBIE) like to throw out the aluminum tins I like to have around for those moments I like to bake things, sometimes these are useful. I will never advocate using pre-made crusts, but I’m just saying it’s easy if necessary. For a good & easy crust recipe, this one works well, substituting shortening (like, who has that around?) with butter/margarine.
6 tomatoes of your choice
6 slices of prosciutto
1/2 cup of feta cheese
oregano, thyme, black pepper
olive oil
Preheat oven to 425
Put a sweet layer of Dijon mustard on the bottom of the crust, layering the sliced up tomatoes on top. Between the tomato layers, insert the prosciutto, and crumble the feta. In the middle, sprinkle olive oil & herbs over the pie. Repeat until the top of the tomato layers reach the top of the pie crust.
Cook for half an hour, or until the cheese is sufficiently browned.
So that’s how I made it the other day, but I’m excited to use extra firm tofu fried in thin strips in olive oil & spices in place of the prosciutto, or alternately, pan-fried tempeh in place as well. I would be curious to see what nutritional yeast would do as an alternate to the cheeses. It would be awesome to throw in thin strips of red pepper as well, or even thinly sliced bits of asparagus, since it’s so wonderfully in season right now.
It’s Seriously the easiest thing.
