Here’s the technical specification Tomato Tarte Tatin. This is a colourful dish, very tasty and handy when you’re dealing with vegetarian constraints.

Prerequisites:

• A round cooking pot or cake tin you can put in the oven. Abort here if you don’t have this
• Big plate larger than the cooking pot or cake tin
• An oven at 220C
• Good oven gloves. We need to be able to hold the cooking pot or cake tin and flip it upside down later

Ingredients:

• Roll of puff pastry. Chilled.
• Cold large plate. Chilled.
• 10-15 small shallots. Some peeled, some sliced
• 500-700g cherry tomatoes. A mix of red and yellow looks best.
• 12g sugar (1 tablespoon, the biggest spoon, not the usual dessert spoon)
• 15ml balsamic vinegar (1 tablespoon)
• 30ml water (2 tablespoons)
• Some sprigs of fresh thyme. Picked leaves and a few long whole sprigs
• salt & pepper
• Mixed herbs

Implementation steps:

Step 1: Oven Preheating (220°C)

Kick this off as it takes a while.

Step 2: Make puff pastry circle

You’re going to cut a circle of puff pastry the same size as your round cooking pot or cake tin. The puff pastry sheet turns to soft mush when warm so we need to keep it chilled. Roll out the cold puff pastry sheet flat on a chopping board or clean work surface. Put the upside-down cooking pot on the flat puff pastry sheet and press down to make a circular indent. With a knife transcribe the outside shape of the circle. Pull away the excess puff pastry and remove the cooking pot or cake tin to leave a circle of puff pastry. Tidy up with a knife or scissors. Transfer the circle to a cold large plate and return it to the fridge.

Step 3: Prepare shallots

The base of the tarte is going to be a mix of red & yellow tomatoes and some whole shallots. We’re also going to have some sliced shallots to soak up the balsamic syrup. So get peeling. Chop some of the shallots into onion rings.

Step 4: Cook the shallots and tomatoes

You can fry up shallots first and the tomatoes second if you only have one pan/cooking pot. To save time you could do both at once. For the shallots: Place pan over a medium heat with 1 tablespoon of cooking oil. Once hot add the shallots and gently brown for about 10 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally, then transfer to a plate. For the tomatoes: add enough cherry tomatoes to cover the whole of the cooking pot or cake tin. Go for the max as they’re going to shrink. Season with salt and pepper. Cook them for 8-10 minutes until the cherry tomatoes start to soften and release their juices but are still holding their shape. Remove to the plate to cool a little.

Step 5: Make the balsamic syrup

Add 2 tablespoons of water to the tomato juices in the pan or cooking pot, followed by the sugar and balsamic vinegar. Bubble for about 3 minutes on a medium-high heat until slightly syrupy, then remove the pan from the heat.

Step 6: Put together the tarte

Your layers going into oven are going to be:

1. syrupy sliced shallots on the bottom
2. whole shallots and tomatoes in the middle
3. Thyme
4. Puff pastry circle on the top

Return the sliced shallots and stir them around in the syrup. Spread them around evenly as the bottom layer of your cooking pot/cake tin. Add the whole shallots and tomatoes as next layer and scatter over the thyme leaves. Lay the pastry circle over the tomatoes and tuck in the edges down the sides. Pierce the pastry with several holes to allow steam to escape otherwise it’ll balloon up.

Step 6: Bake!

Bake in oven for 30 mins. Check after 20mins and move down or cover with foil if it looks like pastry top is getting burnt. We need the pastry to be brown on top and cooked through.

Step 7: Dramatic flip

Our tarte is baked upside down. We’ll need to flip it. With a knife go around the inside walls of the cooking pot/cake tin to make sure the pastry isn’t stuck to the sides. Place a big plate on top of the cooking pot/cake tin. Pick up everything together. In one quick and confident move, rotate so the plate is on the bottom and the cooking pot/cake tin is on top. Pause and pray for the sound of the tarte transferring to the plate, now right way up. Moment of truth. Put everything down on the work surface, remove the cooking pot/cake tin, and say “ta da!”. If there’s tasty caramelised onion stuck to the bottom of the cooking pot/cake tin then scrape these out and put them on top too.

Evidence