This French picnic tart is utterly guest-worthy. It has the comfort-food power of potatoes and cheese, with the depth of umami that slow-cooked onions provide, on a crust that melts in your mouth, delivered in rustically spectacular, fashion.

Ingredients for 4 very large servings or 6 reasonable ones:

1½ cups AP flour
1/2 tsp plus a pinch of salt, divided, plus more for seasoning
1/2 cup (one stick) of cold butter, cut into 16 slices
1½ Tbs cold water
1 lb. small, red potatoes
2 Tbs olive oil
1 large yellow onion, thinly sliced
6 oz. of Gruyère or Emmenthal cheese, shredded
Freshly-ground black pepper, to taste
2 tsp dried sage, crushed between your palms
1/2 cup diced, cooked bacon (from about 1/4 lb. raw bacon)
1 tsp liquid bacon fat or melted butter
1/2 large red bell pepper, thinly sliced

How to do it:

1. Place flour and a pinch salt in a food processor and blend for 15 seconds. One at a time, place a slice into the processor, and then four one-second pulses. After your eighth slice or so, reduce the time to two one-second pulses per addition.

At first, the butter knocks around in the processor bowl quite obviously. After several additions, the general level of noisiness begins to rise, and you can no longer tell if there’s a whole lot of knocking with each new addition. That’s when you start limiting your pulses to two. 

2. Once all the butter’s in, process until the mixture builds up around the wall of the processor and a void begins to form near the blade (this should take more than 10 seconds). Use a spatula to knock the mixture back down and away from the wall. With the processor running, add water very, very slowly and process just until the mixture begins to come together into one or two large masses.

Be sure to have a bit of extra water in your measuring cup, so that if the necessary change doesn’t take place at the 1½ tablespoon mark, you can continue adding more water. If you run out of water, yet continue to process, and then decide that you need to add more water, it’s surprisingly difficult to do.

I can’t emphasize strongly enough how slowly you have to trickle the water in. It should be the slowest trickle that you can produce reasonably, while also having it be a steady stream, rather than intermittent drips.

Take a moment to get your rolling surface and pin ready, and fish around for your springform pan, before you handle the dough.

3. Turn the dough onto a floured surface, bring it together with your hands, and roll to an 11-inch diameter (about 1/8-inch thick). Transfer the dough to an 8-inch springform pan, nestling it into the corners and up the collar. It will not reach all the way up the collar and need not be neat-looking. Set aside. 

The easiest way to do this is to use the “folding” method: gently fold the dough in half, then fold in half again along the straight edge. Match the center of the dough with the center of the pan, unfold your first fold and let the dough fall into the pan. Unfold your second fold and work the dough into place. It’ll be messy, but fixable.   

If you don’t have an 8-inch springform, you can make a 9-inch work. The height of the 8-inch pie is significantly more beautiful. An 8-inch cake pan will work if it is high-sided (2 inches). However, you’ll then have a hell of a time getting the tart out of the pan. If you’re making the tart in advance, then the cake-pan solution becomes viable, since the tart is far less delicate when cold: once the tart is cool enough to handle, run a thin, sturdy knife firmly but carefully around the edges of the pan, making sure to get all the way to the bottom of the pan. Cover the tart and place it in the fridge. Once completely stone cold (preferably the next day), place a small cutting board atop the tart, invert the entire assembly, slip the pan off the tart, then use a similar inversion procedure to get the tart upright on a serving plate. Allow the tart to come to room temperature, loosely covered; or warm the oven, turn it off, and let the tart rest in the residual heat. Expect the knife to scratch the cake pan; if that’s a problem – and if definitely is for me – line the pan with foil before placing the raw crust into it. That should make the knife unnecessary. 

4. Slice the potatoes thinly. Place them in a large skillet and add enough water to cover the bottom of the pan to about 1/4-inch depth. Cover the pan and bring the water to a boil over medium-high heat, about 7 minutes. Reduce heat to lowest setting and simmer the potatoes until they’re soft and limp, but not yet disintegrating, about 9 minutes. Carefully remove them from the pan to a paper-towel-lined plate. Discard the liquid, and clean and dry the pan.
5. Return the pan to the stove over medium-high heat. Add oil to the pan, let it heat up, and then add the onion and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Reduce heat to lowest setting and cook the onions, stirring occasionally, until quite soft and translucent, about 15 minutes. Off heat. Sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. Meanwhile, pre-heat the oven to 375°F.

4. Sprinkle 2/3 of the cheese into the crust-lined springform pan. Layer the onions evenly over the cheese. Sprinkle the sage over the onions. Sprinkle the bacon over the sage. Layer the potatoes neatly over the bacon. Drizzle bacon fat slowly and carefully over the potatoes, aiming for as complete a distribution as possible. Salt to taste. Arrange the peppers over the potatoes in an attractive manner. Sprinkle remaining cheese over the peppers and dust with more pepper.
5. Bake for 45 minutes, then move the tart to the lowest rack position, and bake for 5 more minutes. Allow to cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Run a blade around the circumference of the tart to make sure it’s not sticking to the pan, and then remove the springform collar. Use a very large pancake flipper to very, very carefully move the tart off the springform base and onto a serving platter or cutting board (or cut servings from the springform base if you don’t mind scratching it up). Serve immediately, or while still warm, or at room temperature.

Notes:

Just for fun, a little bit of color, and a touch of flavor, replace two tablespoons-worth of the AP flour with rye or whole wheat pastry flour. However, I find 1/3 of the total to be the limit on replacing the white flour.

If you can find pre-grated Gruyère, bully for you, although I do question the quality of pre-shredded cheese. If you’re shredding this cheese yourself, that’s pretty convenient, because the food processor is the best way to do so and you’ve already got it out. Shred the cheese before you make the crust, and brush the machine out – but don’t bother actually washing it – before making the crust. Once the cheese is shredded, you have to handle it with kid gloves, or it will clump together to such a frustrating degree that it won’t quite behave like shredded cheese.

I’m sure you could rearrange these directions so that you’re multitasking the dough as you’re cooking the onions and potates.

The backstory:

This is another Mollie Katzen recipe from Vegetable Heaven – two, actually: “Perfect Ten^[1]” pie crust and “French Picnic Tart^[2].” I baconized it, you’re welcome, and adapted it for an 8-inch springform pan. I also modified the procedure in ways that seems more intuitive to me, and injected some of my own prejudices – like not peeling the potatoes. Although I’m not a fan of food processor pie crusts, Katzen included an instruction to add the butter bit by bit, which I found curious and wanted to try. It made a tremendous difference and produced an outright enviable crust texture.

Here’s something really fun: you know how the collar of your springform pan has a ridge into which the base fits? Well, if you’re as careless as I am, it turns out that if you put the collar on upside down, the latch will still latch, and it will hold the base into the pan well enough to get the tart into the oven … but not well enough to get it out. As I lifted it off the oven rack and got it about half-way out of the oven, the base fell out, inverted (of course, because that’s how fate rolls with me) and splatted the entire pie: half of it on the bottom of the oven, the other half on the oven door. (Much of it in the crack between the oven and the oven door, of course.) The oven, which of course was screaming hot, started smoking like no one’s business, the smoke detector went off, my five-alarm instant swearing mechanism deployed, and all hell broke loose. So as you can see, this can be a very exciting tart! The photos prove I’m not always quite so careless.

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[1] Katzen, Mollie. 1997. “Perfect Ten Pie Crust.” Vegetable Heaven (Hyperion) 191.

[2] Katzen, Mollie. 1997. “French Picnic Tart.” Vegetable Heaven (Hyperion) 125.

French Picnic Tart with Potatoes, Red Peppers, Sage, and Gruyère

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man!, unless otherwise indicated. Thank you, Kesor. This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything. If you like this tart, here’s a double-crust savory pie that sounds like a great launching point for exploration. 

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