Onion and Cabbage Tart
It's the final week of December!
I have a fridge full of holiday leftovers, plus lots of plans with friends through the weekend and New Year's Eve, so I've only prepped one thing to fill in the food gaps for the rest of the week.
This onion and cabbage tart is a riff on Melissa Clark's Cabbage and Onion Torta from the New York Times. This is the perfect meal to have on hand during times of "underemployment" because it's stinky food that falls apart in a rich, soft mess when it's warm. Who cares if it's a bit ugly? It's all for me!
Planning!
I have loved making this in the past, but it is huge, so I decided to scale back the pastry and do the whole thing in a deep dish pie plate with no top crust rather than as a big ol' slab pie. The filling proportions looked good-on-paper to fit into an open pie, though the grocery score sold me a block of fontina that was 9oz and a package of prosciutto that was 3oz, both of which are a little more than called for by the recipe. Slightly "too much" cheese and meat aren't a real problem, though...
Here's the nutritional breakdown from Fitbit...
Groceries I had on hand...
- AP flour
- butter
- salt
- black pepper
- olive oil
- cabbage
- cider vinegar
- dry bread crumbs
Groceries I had to buy...
- large spanish onion (.89lb @ .59/lb = $.53)
- garlic (you've gotta run out sometime, right?) (.27lb @ 3.99/lb = $1.08)
- thyme ($1.29)
- fontina ($7.49 - worth it!!!)
- proscuitto ($4.49)
Total monies spent for the entire recipe: $14.88
Total monies spent for each of these 6 meals....
$2.48 per meal.
Cooking!
This was a very fun recipe to scale into a different shape and size.
For the crust, rather than follow Clark's recipe, which would make more pastry than I needed, I did a basic paté brisée (1.25cups AP flour to 1 stick butter to 1/8-1/4cup water) plus a heavy handed dash of salt, and an ever heavier handed splash of black pepper mixed in.
I did a blind par-bake on the crust to make sure it was semi-set before adding the filling and finishing the bake. Meaning... I rolled it out, chilled it while I brought the oven up to 400F with a sheet pan in the bottom of the oven. Pricked it all over with a fork. Lined it with tinfoil and filled that tinfoil with the brown rice I keep in a jar to use over and over for blind baking crusts (like you do). Baked for 12 minutes. Took out the rice and the foil, then baked for another 8 minutes.
I do indeed regret not trimming the crust, but I had a weird idea about folding it back over the filling after the par-bake, so that it would nestle it a little, galette-style. But my par-bake was good, so there was a little bit too much structure, and it all turned out somewhat less pretty than it might have.
Nevertheless, onward!
For the filling, I followed the recipe mostly as written, though, as I said, I had just a little bit more cheese and meat on hand to fold in with the veggies. I cooked the veggies much longer than the recipe suggests, because I really wanted to reduce and brown them. And rather than layer filling, I cooled the veggies in the pan, then stirred the cheese and meat evenly into them once they had completely cooled on the countertop.
Then, rather than top it with a top crust, I used the bread crumbs called for in the recipe to sprinkle over the top, which also kept them completely out-of-risk of losing their crunchiness - which would have been a concern if I'd been folding them into the filling that would steam inside a closed crust, per the original recipe. I did only barely toast them on the stovetop, so that they could continue toasting in the oven, without fear of burning!
Needless to say, I'm posting this AFTER eating, because when this weird-looking thing came out of the oven, I let it sit on the countertop for a mere 10 minutes, and then a slice went straight to the plate and then promptly down the hatch.
ooey, gooey!
