Loulou's Onion Roquefort Tart

After my plea for ideas for what to do with Roquefort cheese, Loulou of Chez Loulou (logical enough) was kind enough to clue me in to her recipe for Caramelized Onion, Roquefort and Parmesan Tart.

You can see the result above.

So what the heck is that papery substance doing around this lovely tart, especially on a cooking blog?

Well, truth be told, I never make my own crusts. I know this is very wrong. Yet in France you can buy perfectly edible pâtes brisées -- much better than their American counterparts -- and I buy them all the time. They look like this when you put them in your quiche dish:



The paper the crusts come rolled up in is called papier de cuisson; think of it as waxed paper without the wax. It's a very practical thing, because your crust never sticks when you use it, and you hardly need to wash the dish afterwards.

So to get back to the tart, I caramelized my onions, which meant almost burning them but not quite -- a delicate operation:



Then I got my Roquefort out of the fridge. Here is the horrible truth. My Roquefort did not look like this; it looked like what you see below, and had been languishing in the fridge for weeks, if not months:


But once I opened it up, it appeared pretty peppy: proof that some things, like wine and expatriates, improve with age:



Taking care not to crumble aluminum foil into my tart, I sprinkled bits of elderly Roquefort over the onions:



A little blurry, true, but I have given up any pretenses of being a food photographer.

I do consider myself a photographer of sorts -- but not the culinary sort.

And that's the way it's going to be on Cuisine Quotidienne in 2008; so if you don't care for that approach, click here.

So back to the tart. I kind of, sort of, used Loulou's recipe, but I make no guarantees about the exact proportion of eggs and various creams that went into it. And I definitely didn't have any Parmesan, so Gruyère had to do. But this is how it looked when it went into the oven:


As for when it came out, go back to the top of the post.
How delicious do you think that was?
Merci Loulou!

No comments:

Post a Comment