Tomato Tartlets

Okay, so these aren't really tomato tartlets. More like Tomato purée tartlets but they are really neat fancy snacks that you could serve to your friends. Or eat them yourself if you're into the whole, you know, gluttony thing. Which I am totally into, didn't you know? :p

But anyway, the reason why I wanted to make something with tomato purée was because I had this one 200ml tetra pack of tomato purée on the shelf. When my sister had come home for the independence day holidays(another Symbiosis Viman Nagar Student! Yay for Viman Nagar and a bigger YAY for Konark Kampus-Was it with a C or a K? I don't remember. It's been so long), I really went overboard and made things with tomato purée because well, she wanted to eat my home-made spaghetti meatballs and then she wanted to eat pizza made from scratch. So, I used like seven packs of tomato purées in the four days that she was in Delhi (the little minx is coming back for the Japanese Summer Festival in September). So today, I decided to use the last pack. Because it was very close to its expiration date.

Recipe

For the tartlets, you need tarlet shells! Duh! No but seriously. To make 4 shells, you need 100 gms of plain flour, 25 grams of either butter or oil, half a teaspoon of salt, one egg yolk and 2 teaspoons of water. Combine these ingredients together and make a rough dough. Do not knead the dough otherwise you'll create additional gluten and you don't want your tartlets to be like very dense bread! No you want it to be light and flaky! 

Now, break this dough into four parts and press them into your tartlet pans. If you don't have tartlet pans with a removable bottom, mould aluminium foil on the inside of the pans like so...

...and rub-ba-dub-dub some butter on the aluminium foil so that the dough doesn't stick on it as it bakes and then, as said before, press the dough into the pans and poke the bottoms with a fork...

...and bake in an 180C preheated oven for 20 minutes or until the tops of the shells change colour to light brown. 

The aluminium foil should help the tart shells slip right out and what you will end up with are these crispy, fully baked tarts that are just calling out to be filled and bitten into. Yes I know, I'm awesome and I should be on the food network.

The filling

Normally when making tart shells, I wouldn't purée the tomatoes because I like the wholesome feel of the tomato slices or tomato dice and also because it's always great when there a sense of a multi dimensional texture in a dish. I think it really helps when things don't taste like baby food. So, ideally,  this filling should have had a bit more contrasting texture oomph to it but the fact that the shells are crusty and crispy really helps move this dish from a tad boring to really really divine.

So, in a pan (on medium) with a wee bit of oil, put in a small diced up onion, 3 cloves of garlic and about a tablespoon of dried rosemary. Stir till the onions are translucent. Add 200 ml of tomato purée. Stir then partially cover the pot with a lid and reduce the flame to low. Stir occasionally and cook for about  20 minutes. Add two cubes of cheese. Stir and simmer without the lid till you get a consistency similar to that in the picture below:

Let this mixture cool then whiz it up in the food processor and pour into cooled tartlet shells. 

And there you have it. Tomato Tartlets!

PS: Can your sauce do this? If it can, its of the right consistency. Congrats. 

Oh! And this sauce makes an awesome pizza sauce. Enjoy!