My refrigerator’s cheese keeping bin is always well stocked. That’s because our dinner parties always include a cheese course, and Tom always assumes his double-0 designation when he shops at Murray’s, our favorite cheese store. He invariably buys more cheeses than we planned on, and “somehow” the pieces always looked smaller in the store than they do at home. Leftovers are never a problem, though. Most cheeses keep well for a long time. (As Clifton Fadimen said, cheese is “milk’s leap toward immortality.”)
So we do a lot with odds and ends of cheeses. I can make a nice lunch on cheese and a sliced apple. Tom has an everyday dinner first-course specialty that we call “cheese thingies.” He tops a pita or paratha with any kind of meltable cheese, often adding olives or salami or whatever else he finds in the refrigerator, and broils it in the toaster oven. As for me, when I’m feeling ambitious I make us cheese soufflés. And when I’m feeling a little less ambitious, I make us individual cheese tarts.
These are totally simple. Line small tart pans with any kind of pastry, fill them with small pieces of two or three kinds of cheese – something soft and runny, something mild and melty, something hard and sharp to grate over the top – and bake at 375° for about half an hour.
Here are the remains of dinner-party cheeses I used for my latest batch. On the left, a soft Bucheron (French goat); in the middle an old, hard Manchego (Spanish sheep); on the right, a medium-textured Pleasant Ridge Reserve (US cow).
I usually have some leftover pastry dough in the freezer that I can defrost for these tarts. The kind I like best is pasta frolla. Its slight sweetness plays interestingly against the cheese flavors. I’m a big fan of pasta frolla in general, though it can be difficult to work with. In The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen I wrote almost four pages about it. If you’re interested, you can read that little essay and the recipe here.
I do cut back on the sugar in that recipe when I’m making savory tarts. And, happily, the small amounts of pasta frolla needed for individual tarts are quite easy to handle. So here are my latest versions ready to go into the oven:
And here they are, ready to eat.
They were delicious. Every mixture of cheeses I’ve tried has been good. And if I make more tarts than we want for immediate eating, the extras take well to freezing. Slowly defrosted and warmed in the oven, they’re still delicious.
Would you say these tarts are related to gougeres, French cheese puffs? I’ve sucesfully made gougeres au cumin more than once. They’re so good — too good to make too often!
Not really, Teresa. I love gougeres too, but they’re a very different thing. They’re made with a puff paste — pate a choux — into which the cheese is mixed before baking, and they don’t have a pastry crust. My little tarts are nothing but cheese, baked in the crust.