Bake 52 Week 22 - Rustic Caramelized Onion Tarts

Here's my first recipe with this baking group. I decided to make the pizza crust from scratch. If I'm going to bake it doesn't make sense to buy a pizza dough, right??

This was the first time I've used my food processor for a dough recipe. It seemed to come together really well and very quickly. I let it rest for the two minutes the recipe requires and then blended it for 30 seconds as called for in the recipe. I don't know what that did since it just seemed to spin around and made my food processor just about vibrate off the counter.

I had some flour left in the bowl of my processor but the dough wasn't sticky at all so I didn't worry about it. I was supposed to let it double in size before using and the cookbook said it would take 1 - 1.5 hours to do that. I have had terrible luck with dough rising as expected so I was worried it wouldn't be ready in time to finish my recipe before I had to leave for church. The house was 70 degrees and to my amazement and hour and a half later...

It was double in size!!! About a half hour before it was supposed to be ready I started getting the rest of the ingredients ready for the tart. The dough was looking good so I figured it would be ready and for once my timing was spot on.

I started with cutting the new potatoes (1 lb) with my mandolin. I was worried they would go brown while I was working on the rest of the ingredients so I put them in water.

I almost forgot to cook them but luckily I caught that part of the recipe just before I had to assemble the tart. But then I burned my fingers (not bad) trying to assemble the tart because I didn't have time to wait for them to cool down. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

I started out cutting the onions with a knife because I thought my mandolin would cut the to thin but after cutting one and my eyes starting to water I decided whatever thickness I got from the mandolin was good enough.

That's a big bowl of onions!

My oil never did seem to shimmer but it had been heating for a while so I dumped all the onions in. After the 10 minutes of cooking them covered I had no idea if they had "released their juices" but most of them seemed pretty soft so I cranked up the heat and worked on getting them brown, which took longer than the recipe said. But I think that's because my stove is electric and it takes a bit to get hot.

They look pretty good right??


Now I was ready to assemble the tart. I rolled half the dough out and tried to make it into an oval, not much luck there but then I spread the olive oil on the dough, seasoned it with pepper and then spread on half the onions. I topped the onions with the cooked potatoes, rosemary and feta cheese. I was supposed to use goat cheese but I'm not a big fan of stinky, smelly cheeses which is why I picked the potato, rosemary, goat cheese option because the original recipe called for blue cheese - yuck!

The final assembled product.

It was pretty good but I couldn't taste the onions very well, which was a bummer. I think using the whole wheat crust obscured some of the onion flavor. Plus there were too many potatoes. I followed the recipe there but it ended up covering the whole tart in at least one to two layers of potato. So the flavor of the onions was buried under the flavor of potato. But I had some leftovers (cold) for breakfast this morning and it was actually better. Go figure...

So probably not something I'll make again but I'm sure going to be looking for an excuse to use carmalized onions!


Check out Michelle's blog for the full recipe. If you want to make the potato version it just took 1# of new potatoes (but I'd decrease that), 1 cup of cheese (goat according to the recipe) and 1/2 tsp of chopped rosemary. You just split all that between the two tarts.