Blueberry and Strawberry Tart

by inspiredtaste on June 3, 2010

On Memorial Day were were lucky enough to spend our day with a wonderful family, outside enjoying the sun. The morning of, we realized we had nothing to bring with us, not really wanting to run to the store so early, we scrounged for anything that could possibly be turned into something we would be proud to bring. Fortunately, the day before I went on what can only be described as a fruit rampage – there I was, walking into the produce section of Whole Foods after shopping for the ingredients for our Agave Salmon Burgers and saw 1) beautiful sweet cherries, 2) bright blue blueberries, and 3) the prettiest strawberries ever! I of course, not really thinking about how the heck the two of us will ever finish all the fruit bought a bag of each and came home sheepishly to Adam, who had quite the look when he was helping me unload all of that fruit – my only response was but, they were sooo pretty.

So with a refrigerator full of fruit, we came to the conclusion that we would make a blueberry tart, that was until we realized, we didn’t have enough blueberries for a blueberry tart, which brought us to our final quite logical decision, a blueberry and strawberry tart. We had just enough time to make our pie dough, which is a sweeter pie/tart dough called pâte sucrée, perfect to balance the slight tartness of the blueberries and lime that we added to the filling. Plus, using the sweeter tart dough allowed us to be fuss-free when assembling our filling. All we did was add a small amount of sugar, a touch of flour (to thicken the juices when cooking), lime zest, lime juice and bit of butter.

The pie dough is relatively easy to make, but does take a bit of time, so if you needed to, a store-bought pie dough would be fine (we do that all the time), you may just want to increase the sugar in the filling.

We made our pâte sucrée in a food processor since we don’t have a stand mixer and could not bear the thought of doing it by hand: First, we creamed sugar and butter, then added eggs, pulsed a bit, then flour and pulsed a bit more. We took the dough out of the processor and wrapped it up in some plastic wrap then let it cool in the refrigerator for about 20 minutes. We rolled out our dough, placed it in our tart pan, added our filling, dabbed some butter on top and placed it in the oven for just over an hour. The pie was devoured along with many hot dogs, burgers and margaritas!

Blueberry and Strawberry Tart

Sweet Pie/Tart Dough (Pâte Sucrée)
makes enough dough for a 9″ or 10″ tart/pie

2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated white sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, sliced
2 large eggs

Add the sliced butter and sugar into the food processor and pulse until they are creamed, light and fluffy. Add one egg and the yolk of the second egg, then pulse again until incorporated; reserve the egg white from the second egg until end in case the dough is too dry. Sift the flour and salt together, then add to the food processor, pulse until the mixture comes together in a ball. If the mixture will not form into a ball and looks dry after about 30 seconds, add the reserved egg white. Turn out the dough onto plastic wrap and flatten into a disk; place into the refrigertaor for about 20 minutes.

On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough, starting from the middle and working out. The dough should be uniform in thickness and about 1/4 inch. Roll the dough onto the rolling pin and carefully place into a 8″ or 9″ tart pan. Without stretching the dough, lightly press the dough into the bottom and up the sides of the pan then fill with you desired filling.

Blueberry and Strawberry Tart Filling

2 cups fresh blueberries, picked over and rinsed
1 cup fresh sliced strawberries
1 lime
2 tablespoons granulated white sugar
2 tablespoons all purpose four
dash salt
1 tablespoon butter, cut in to small pieces
2 tablespoons blueberry or strawberry jam

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In a bowl add the blueberries, sliced strawberries, zest and juice of the lime, sugar and flour then carefully fold everything together. Pour the filling into a prepared uncooked tart shell then sprinkle the bits of butter all over the tart. Bake in the oven for 1 hour to 1 hour 20 minutes, the tart shell should be cooked and lightly brown on the edges. Remove the tart from the oven and allow to cool for at least 25 minutes.
In a small saucepan, gently heat the jam then use a pastry brush to brush the warmed jam all over the top of the tart, allow the tart to cool a bit longer then serve with ice cream or whipped cream.

* Adapted from Cooking, James Peterson