This post is my kind of spring edition – many fruits (and one vegetable) that is in high season now is involved. When I returned from the greengrocer I was so overwhelmed with all the vegetable beauty that I first did not think of pans and pots but of the camera. The four plants worked so good together in a shooting that I wanted to combine them in a dish as well (even though the strawberries and rhubarb were meant for a crumble which will follow in a post next week).
Alsatian Tarte Flambée was on my mind, soon, and as I had some filo dough in the fridge I thought it would do the job as well. However I decided not to take in all four „models“ but to do pairs: rhubarb and strawberries on the one side and green asparagus and loquats on the other side – and both come along with goat’s milk cheese. Arne and me had a lot of fun with taking photos and eating all at the same time and trying to keep the kind of fragile pieces in our hands – this dish is so much a happy spring treat that we needed to touch and feel it. We came to the conclusion that strawberries are overwhelmingly great for pizza – never would have thought of this before. And we just loved the loquats – oven-baked they taste like abricots with a nice touch of acidity.
There have been two major inspirations for this: Christina of the Small Kitchen Chronicles posted a gorgeous Goat Milk Bread Pudding with Mapled Rhubarb the other day and I gladly picked the idea of combining rhubarb and goat’s milk cheese for my tarte (with caramelized rhubarb as I did not have maple syrup at hand). Antje of lifestyle in grün introduced us with loquats some days ago. She served fantastic Karamellisierter Spargel mit Mispel-Vinaigrette (white asparagus with a loquat vinaigrette, recipe in German language) which also seemed to be a wonderful combination to me. Thanks a lot to both of you for the fine inspiration!
Here’s my recipe
To serve two people with a small portion, take 5 filo dough layers that lie on top of each other. Take it of the fridge a couple of minutes before you start compiling the tarte. Peal the skin off the loquats, cut in halfs and take of the seeds and inner skins. Clean the strawberries and cut into halfs. Trim the rubarb (I don’t peal of the skin if its thin enough) and cut into not too small pieces. Trim and cut into pieces a few green asparagus shoots and cut into pieces as well (I took just the tops and will do some soup with the rest tomorrow).
Blanch the asparagus in boiling water for a minute, drain well and put aside. Heat the rhubarb in a small pan with few neutral oil and add some sugar. Let caramelize for 1 minute. Mix 75 g sour cream and 75 g smetana and salt and pepper to taste.
Cut the layered dough lengthwise in two halfs, put on a baking tray and add the cream mixture on top. Put asparagus, some slices of goat’s milk soft cheese and the loquats on one half and the rhubarb on the other. Pepper to taste. Put to the preheated oven (180 °C) for ten minutes. Add the strawberries and some goat’s milk cream cheese to the rhubarb tart, and add some cleaned lemon thyme twigs on top (I am not sure where the inspiration for this came from but I guess it has been Uda of Mittag bei Mutti who introduced me with this herb that is absolutely fantastic). Bake for another 10-15 minutes until the dough get’s brown (not too dark!) on the sides and the cheese has melted. Take off the oven, add some olive oil on both tartes and some mascobado sugar on the strawberry rhubarb tarte and serve with a salad.
Today, there’s no urban shots as this post is already overcrowded with photos ;-).
Food with a View 
Oh my goodnesss, that’s great. I recently thought about some kind of tarte flambée with green asparagus. Now I’ll switch my thoughts!
Thanks a lot for mentioning my vinaigrette with loquats. By the way: Botanically correctly your “medlars” are “loquats” or Japanese Plums/Medllars. Medlars are a kind of fruit which is very difficult to transport because of its brown creamy consistency – and they are mostly found in wilderness but in agricultural cultivation.
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Thank you for the compliment and for the info about the name! I will have to change that.
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Fantastic! 🙂 Would never have gotten the idea to combine those four! What kind of dough is Filo? Just asking because I have some Turish Dough but that doesn’t need to be stored in the fridge…
Lemon thyme is living on my kitchen window sill for a month now and I adore it! It adds a special lemon taste to almost verything. It was fantastic (accompanied by lemon juice and peel) in the bechamel for the asparagus lasagne I recently made.
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So far as I know: The turkish Yufka is a little bit thicker than Filo, so it needs a little bit longer to become baked right through.
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Thanks. But Filo is just wheat, not fat already added?
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Only wheat, water and a pinch of salt – no fat.
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Thank you for the compliment, Eva!
As to your questions: Antje gave some answers to it already (thanks for that!), and I would like to add that – according to my experience – the ingredients of filo depend on where you buy the filo (or on the recipe in case that you make the dough from scratch). Mine is with wheat flour only and with fat added to the dough already, and yes, it has to be stored in the fridge.
By the way, Antje: do you know where to buy whole flour filo? I did some research for online shops and could not find it I but would love to try this.
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Unfortunately, there’s no retailer in Germany – so far as I could find up to now – who sells whole grain filo (phyllo) dough. But for all Americans right here there’s a source: http://www.fillofactory.com. I make – if I make – my filo dough from scratch and I use to use durum wheat for it (like the german “Strudel”-dough).
Thanks, Claudia for your information about the filo dough’s ingredients – I didn’t know that there are fat containing varieties. Looking at my favourite translater dict.cc there’s a hint that “phyllo dough” and “filo pastry” probably will be falsely mixed up – “filo pastry” is often used as the name for the german “Blätterteig”. Which means: It contains fat. I’m confused…
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Thank you for the quick research info and the link!
The big dough confusion 😉 . The filo I used is definitely no puff pastry, but filo in general is indeed very simimlar to strudel dough that you mentioned (which is softer than filo because it contains more fat than filo). It depends on the result that you want to have if you add fat or not – the dough can be rolled out finer with some butter or oil, and with few or without fat the cohesion is less strong. Is it really me who is writing that, the absolute non-expert in dough question…
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Für die Blätterung eines Filo braucht man Butter, Öl oder eine Butter-/Öl-Milch-Mischung. Im Grundteig ist je nach Rezept ein kleines Quentchen Öl (oder sogar Hefe) zu finden, aber das allein würde für eine schöne Blätterung noch nicht ausreichen… Also streicht man die Blätter (ob nun gekauft oder homemade) mit flüssigem Fett ein und legt sie dann übereinander. Wenn sie vorher dünn genug ausgerollt waren, muss man nun nicht mehr ausrollen. Waren die Blätter homemade und evtl. noch nicht dünn genug, touriert man und rollt nochmals aus.
Und ich predige wie der Rufer in der Wüste, dass selbstgemachter Teig viel besser schmeckt und wirklich nicht schwer herzustellen ist… 😉 Dann könntest Du auch whole wheat verwenden… 😉
Und sonst: Ich hätte gerne ein Stück mit Erdbeere und Rhabarber!
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Danke für den Input, Yushka! Ich gebe den mal direkt an Antje und Eva weiter (ich selbst scheitere in der Praxis leider an jeder Form von selbstgemachtem Teig, der dünner sein muss als eine Lasagne-Platte ;-)).
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“Määäh!” says the goat’s cheese, “where’s my rhubarb?” “on the strawberry filo!” shouts the lemon thyme.
“Don’t care about it and come over here, asparagus and I need some hearty support to win the taste challenge!”
Habe grade viel zu wenig Zeit um mich ausgiebig über deine fantastische Kreation auszulassen. Aber es ist so schick, so sabberfödernd, so schön anzusehen! Muss dringend Koffer packen, habe ein Wildkräuterbuch gekauft. Brandenburg wir jetzt durchforstet! liebste Grüße!!
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What a nice conversation among vegetables and animals ;-).
Danke für das tolle Kompliment, ich freue mich! Und ich wünsche Dir ganz viel Spaß auf Kräutertour (und auch sonst) in der Brandenburgischen Botanik. Ich bin sehr gespannt, an welchen Herrlichkeiten Du uns nach Deiner Rückkehr teilhaben lassen wirst.
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Your post is definitely not overcrowded with photos. Each and every one wants me to jump on a plane or a train and to rush to Berlin. But I guess you’ve already eaten all of them – I mean the tartes and not the photos. Life can be a bit unfair! In Berlin you’ve got the better weather and the sunshine on top. We’re shivering in the rain and drinkin tea with rhum.
Wish you a nice long Pentecost weekend. Have fun and fantastic food.
Heike
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Thank you so much! Great that you like the photos. And you are right, the tartes are all eaten already…
Hope you will have better wheather in Odenwald soon as well! Tea with rum at Pentecost is definitely a meteorological provocation;-.
Best, Claudia
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I absolutely love rhubarb! These look fantastic! 🙂
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Thank you very much, Puja :-).
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Eine perfekte Kombination! Wirklich wunderbar. Hach…. Hunger!
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Oh, danke Dir!
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