Goat Cheese Tart with Tomato Salad and Olive Tapenade

This is a delightful first Course! It’s also perfect for Lunch or a Sunday Brunch. You can prepare it in a 10” tart pan or individual tart pans. They both make a wonderful presentation. Because this can be served room temperature, it’s also wonderful to take on a picnic!! Enjoy it with a glass of Champagne or a French Rose Wine.

Ingredients:
For the dough:
1 3/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon diamond kosher salt
10 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 extra large egg yolks
3 tablespoons ice water

For the tart:
1-2 tablespoons olive oil
3 large sweet onions, thinly sliced
2 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
1/2-1 teaspoon kosher salt
Fresh ground pepper, black or white pepper
8 ounce goat cheese, room temperature
8 ounce cream cheese, room temperature
2 extra large eggs, room temperature

375 degree oven
Bake tart shell lined with foil and filled with beans or rice for 15-18 minutes, until light brown. Remove foil and beans and continue to bake for another 3-5 minutes until golden. Cool to room temperature.

Cook onions with olive oil, bay leaf, thyme and a kosher salt. Slowly braise onions for 30-45 minutes.

Whip together goat cheese, cream cheese, eggs, salt and pepper. Set aside

Line the bottom with braised onions that have cooled to room temperature. Top with goat cheese Mixture and bake for 10-12 minutes.

Serve with tomato salad and olive tapenade.

Tomato Salad:
1 pint cherry tomatoes
1-2 teaspoons finely diced shallots
1 tablespoon chopped chives
Squeeze of lemon juice
Drizzle of good extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Tapenade:
1 cup pitted Kalamata olives
3-4 tablespoons olive oil

Hello everyone and welcome back to cooking with Suzanne so it’s Easter week and I thought it would be nice to prepare a dish that you could serve either as a first course before an Easter dinner or if you’re having a nice lunch in you could serve this as a

Luncheon you could also serve it as part of an Easter brunch it’s a goat cheese tart with caramelized onions served with a cherry tomato s salad and an olive topad I know it sounds like it will be a lot of work but it really isn’t the

First thing that we need to do is to make our tart dough which is very simple you can even use your food processor you can use your kitchen aid or you can do it by hand whatever you prefer in making a tar dough so the first thing we want

To do is put in our flour we have 1 and 3/4 cups of allpurpose unbleached flour that’s going to go into our food processor one teaspoon of diamond kosher salt and we also need butter which is 10 tablespoon of unsalted butter so that’s one stick of butter plus two more

Tablespoons and this is unsalted and all I did was just cut it up into pieces which I’m going to put right here in with the flour and then of course we need some liquid to bring it all together we’re going to use some ice water and two

Extra large egg yolks so all you want to do is first just pulse this I do have top here so the flow doesn’t come flying out and you just want to pulse this until the it the butter is more like P size okay let’s check it

Now okay so now we have nice small pieces of butter in our mixed in with our flour and salt so now we can go ahead and add our liquid in this dish I have two extra large egg yolks and I have a bowl of ice water so we need three tablespoons of

Ice water and of course try to get the ice cubes out of there so here’s two tablespoons plus a one tablespoon and with the machine running we’re going to just pass this through the feed tube of of our mixer and then just add our egg yolk and water all

Together until it all comes together let’s put in just a little bit more ice water about a teaspoon there we go put just a little bit of flour on your work surface and bring this all together there’s a good amount of moisture it’s nice it’s not dry you

Don’t want your tar dough to be really dry because when you roll it out it’s just going to break and crack and you’re going to have a tough time with it let’s get that all there and then just bring this all together and I don’t even need that

Flour I can tell it’s perfect just the way it is oh this looks really good and it’s not sticky but it’s also not dry here you can see it it’s nice you see it’s nice and moist it’s not dry but it’s not wet either okay that’s perfect

And put this in the refrigerator for about an hour before we roll it out and and you could do this a day in advance also so I’m just going to flatten this out there we go and in the meantime we can work on other parts of the dish let’s get the

Rest of the components all together and assembled so I mentioned that there is caramelized onions in the goat chees tart so we need to caramelize some onions you can either use shallots you could use a sweet onion you could use leaks anything in the onion family

Will be delicious in this tar so I have one large sweet onion and I have two shallots in this dish which I just sliced fairly thinly so I have some olive oil on the stove in a sauté pan and I’m going to turn it up now I’ve had

On low so I know my oil is hot and I will add the onions and along with the onions I’m going to add two sprigs of fresh thyme from the garden and one bay leaf and I’ll season it with a little bit of kosher salt so

Let’s get our bay leaf in and our th and we will throw in our onions and what you want to do is basically sauté them on low so that they don’t get a lot of color but they get very sweet and very very tender so let

Me get some salt in here I would say about a half a teaspoon should be plenty and give this a stir now we can turn this down I have it on very low and I’m going to cover it and basically sweat it for about 10 minutes 10 to 15 minutes then

There will be some water in the bottom of the pan we’ll take the cover off and then we’ll let it continue cooking it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depending on your flame and how quickly and how much water is actually in uh your onion let’s make our cherry

Tomato salad so I have some cherry tomatoes here which I’m just going to slice in half and I love the flavor of some onion in here there’s onion in the tart so a little bit of onion here in the cherry tomato salad is also very

Good so I have a half a shallot that I minced very finely you don’t want large pieces of onion in here so it’s just just one basket of cherry tomatoes let’s put I would say about a teaspoon you don’t need a lot but you want enough to flavor your

Tomatoes and then we have some fresh chives here if you have some really good sharp scissors It’s a Wonderful way to cut your chives um but if your scissors are dull it’s not going to work and you’re better off just using a knife a sharp knife but these scissors I save specifically for

My herbs so it’s nice and sharp and you can put as much or as little as you like I would say a good tablespoon of fresh chives will be really nice here let’s season it with a little bit of kosher salt and some black pepper

And this is where you want to use a good extra virgin olive oil if you have it in something like this so I’m just going to do a little squeeze of lemon juice and I have a very nice Extra Virgin Olive Oil from France so we’re going to use a little bit

Here and then you can just taste and see how it is and just set this aside and if you decide to make this ahead of time and refrigerate it make sure you take it out and have it come back to room temperature so this looks wonderful take a look and you can

See the shallots the chives looks really nice ol of toonot can be obviously it we’re going to use camada olives but you can add garlic you could add anchovy you could add Capers you can add even um fig Jam I’ve added to make a more complic more complex uh

Topad but you can also just use the olives the camada olives and some extra virgin olive oil and you get a very very intense Olive bright taste and for a dish like this I think it’s plenty I don’t think you need to add anything to it other than that so let’s just

Take it’s for every cup of camada Olives you would use a/4 of a cup of extra virgin olive oil all right I normally would do this in the food processor but it’s such a small amount I just have a half a cup and I always if you do get them pitted I

Always slice them in half because every once in a while you will find a pit in your your um your olives and you don’t want to puree that so I always slice it in half to make sure there are absolutely no pits so in here I have a

Half a cup very small amount because it’ll be enough for us and I’m going to add a tablespoon 2 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil and I’m just going to use an immersion Bowl okay looks good just make sure that the olive oil is mixed in really

Well so our dough has chilled and I’m taking it out and also the caramelized onions are done they’re more like brazed onions on they have a light color to them but you don’t want too much color but you want them fully cooked nice and soft and you really get the wonderful

Flavor of the bay leaf and the thyme which you’re going to pull out once the onions are cooked so let me just show you what it looks like this is what your onions look like you see they’re nice and soft and oh the flavor is just perfect so you can either

Do it in a large 10-in tart pan that has a removable bottom or if you wanted to do it as an appetizer like we did at the restaurant you can use this size which is about 3 and 1/2 in it’s almost 4 in uh from the top from the bottom it’s

About 3 and 1/4 in or if you wanted to do it more of a lunin size I would say this is 4 and a half on top and about 4 and a qu so a little bit larger for a lunch in size so we’ll go ahead and do the appetizer size portion

All right so there’s the different size and if you were to do the large one you would need about three onions or if you were to do you would get about 12 of these and you’d get probably more six to seven of this size okay I have I have my oven at

375° and you just want a little bit of flour on your work surface so this is just about half of the dough and I will take a third of it I’m sure this will be enough to make one tart flatten it out a little bit get a little

Flour on both sides you don’t need a lot of flour doesn’t take much okay you can roll the whole dough out too and uh just make circles and just do it that way but here I’m just going to take one piece of dough it’s beautiful dough and it rolls very

Nicely and you want it about an e/ in thick is what you’re looking for and this looks very nice and I think that’s about right where we want it just there we go okay so you want to actually cut the circle larger than the actual tart

Because you have to get the sides in you can use a ring you can use a small plate anything that you need to this ring isn’t even quite large enough for this so I’m actually going to just take a knife and go another inch outside the ring to make sure that I

Have enough dough here okay that should be plenty and then you just want to go in and just go around and once your dough is and make sure that it’s all the way in the corners then you can just press on it to remove the excess dough or you can roll

Your rolling pin right over the top and then just use your thumb or your finger the side of your finger uh to go in and press along the sides to make sure that it’s in nice and tight and then just take a fork and go ahead and just prick the

Bottom here is the tart and now I will refrigerate this for about 15 to 20 minutes let it get nice and cool I already have a couple of them in the refrigerator already made and the dough is nice and firm and I’ve already pricked the bottom

So you just need to take a sheet pan and you do want to line it with a piece of foil and I recommend you buying very inexpensive foil because it tends to be more flimsy which makes it very easy for you to go around and put it into your individual tar

Shells okay just take some dried beans or you can use rice and you want to fill it and that is so that the dough does not rise so you have a really nice tar shell to put your filling and we’re going to bake this at 375° for 15

Minutes then you will remove the foil and the beans and let it go for another 3 to 4 minutes until you have a beautiful golden brown and let’s get these in the oven I have two tarte shells already baked off and I’m just going to show you how easy it is to lift

These out of the tart pan and you can see how nice and golden the the bottom is and they are fully cooked so let’s prepare our filling here I have for a to use a make a large tart you’re going to need 8 oz of cream

Cheese and 8 oz of goat cheese here I’m only cutting this in half I’m making a small amount okay so here’s 4 oz but for a full tart pan you will need 8 oz and here I have some beautiful organic uh ret goat cheese so let’s put in it’s

Equal amount 4 oz and 4 oz and by the way you do want it nice in room temperature nice and soft so that it mixes together really really well and then we have one extra large egg so this is so easy to double quadruple because it’s all equal amounts

4 oz 4 oz to one egg so if you’re going to do the whole large tart you would need two extra large eggs 8 oz of cream cheese 8 oz of goat cheese and we’re also going to add a little bit maybe about A4 of a teaspoon of kosher

Salt and an e/ of a teaspoon of either black pepper or white pepper whatever you happen to like since my cheese is nice and room temperature it mixes very beautifully now let’s go ahead and put in our egg okay that’s it just give this a good mix

Oh it looks beautiful now you want to put a nice layer of onions on the bottom and then we will Top it with our go chees and bake them in the oven again 375° and they will take just until everything is set your crust is fully

Cooked it’s it takes about 12 to 15 minutes all right so I have a nice layer on the bottom and then I like to at the restaurant we used to use the ice cream scoopers which works really really well so we’re just going to take a mound and set it right on

Top okay just use an offset spatula and go in and fill your tar shell you want it to be to reach basically the top of your tarte showell I have my oven at 375 I’ll check them in 12 minutes anywhere from 12 to 15 minutes that these are 12 minutes and

They look lovely they have puffed up hopefully you can see that but they’ve puffed up and they’re set very very nicely they look great and they’re definitely ready now what’s really nice also about this particular Tart Is that you don’t want to serve it hot you want to serve

It either warm or room temperature the flavor of the cheese really comes through that way so you have a little leeway which is really nice down one of these beautiful tarts right in the center of the plate I really do believe this size is absolutely perfect okay now let me check my tart

Shells let me just set those down there and we can go ahead and finish plating our lovely tart so you have your wonderful cherry tomatoes and if you can do them a little bit in advance it really the onion and ch really the shallot and chives really

Come through and uh makes lovely flavor for the cherry tomatoes and we have our toput so you can either put a nice mound of cherry tomatoes on the side of your plate it all depends on the size of the tart this is fairly small so we can actually plate

About I’m going to say maybe four halves on the top and then just a very very small amount of the top of knot if the oil has come to the top just mix it in and this will last in the refrigerator for a little bit so this is

Nice to make aead ahead of time also and once again you could serve it either on the plate or directly on the tart which we will do right there and we have a lovely fresh pansy that we will put right on top of the TOA knot and I have a very

Small uh Basil Leaf here which I will put right in front of the cherry tomato and I think that looks very appetizing and all the flavors will be delicious so let’s come around and show you our completed goat cheese tart make sure that it’s set right in

The middle of your plate I think a glass of sparkling wine or a glass of Rosé would be perfect for this tart so te everyone happy Easter to everyone hope you have a wonderful holiday take care bye now