These little custard tarts…
I have given this title “my so called Portuguese custard tarts” to today’s blog because I made my first batch of those tarts one afternoon a couple month ago with some left over puff pastry and left over crème patissiere which I was using for another dessert. I did not want to throw away puff pastry trimmings, no no no! I quickly got out of the drawer my muffin trays, chucked in the pieces of pastry roughly, I did not even bother soldering them together when sometimes 2 were necessary for one hol. Then I grabbed the plastic container with left over crème patissiere from the fridge, filled the holes with that, egg washed/milk washed the edges and zoum! Direction, the oven.
Result: yum, yum yum!
Since, I made them again, they are truly so delicious! I have perfected a bit my technique by adding rough raw sugar over the egg washed rim of the tartlets, it makes it a bit caramelized. My recipe is here. You can access it anytime from the main recipe menu of my blog.
Not just delicious, they are very easy and quick to make, once you have the crème patissiere ready and puff pastry ready.
Of course you could buy good quality puff pastry and good quality custard and make them in the moment, but sourcing these products in Australia will take you about as much time as doing it yourself! Do you know that supermarket puff pastry in Australia is not made out of butter but margarine? Well, check the back of the packet, basically, it is oil! The alternative is to buy the “Careme” brand out of selected stores. In Europe, you probably do not have that problem, I remember reading in some cooking blogs that Picard has a good product (but frozen) and there is at least another brand which was well regarded.
Anyway, once you have tried, you will not go back to the oil based version.
When I learned they were so popular that some shops only make and sell those tartlets, I read a few recipes. I had no idea they were a Portuguese specialty called “pasteis de nata”. What I don’t do is roll the puff pastry in a roll, let it cool overnight and cut discs the next day which are then flattened and used as basis. Check “Not quite Nigella“, she explains the concept very well. This means that the layering of the of pastry is now perpendicular to the cut and the visual effect is nicer.
Making puff pastry
Making puff pastry is not that hard, best is to do a big batch and freeze in portions. Look at the photo below, it is a cross section of a freshly made batch, you can see all of the folds!
I find it fun. Enclosing the butter is not hard and so far, for me, it has never burst out! I am giving the recipe and plenty image on a separate page here. Well, if the link does not work immediately, be patient, I am being boosted out of this laptop (my work laptop) by a schedule software update, a countdown has started on my screen! My personal laptop suddenly stopped working yesterday, I can’t get it to start. luckily we managed to access the hard drive and copy its content.
Coming up next week
A few bakery / cake shop discoveries in Sydney!! Plus some of their recipes tried for you (one is just cooling down on the kitchen bench).
