Serves: 3-4 adults
Preparation time: 30 minutes; Cooking time: 2 hours total.
Ingredients
Pastry
500 g potatoes
80 g cold butter
160 g flour
40 g parmesan (optional)
pinch dried thyme
Filling
5-6 leeks, medium to large
100 g soft goat’s cheese
40 ml milk
2 eggs
2 cloves garlic
olive oil
fresh thyme leaves
Method
Heat oven up to bake at 160°C (320°F). Boil 1 litre of water in a kettle.
Peel potatoes and cut into rough cubes. Place into the saucepan with a pinch of salt and the boiling water. Boil for 10 minutes or until the potatoes are soft but not disintegrating. Spread them out onto a plate or tray to cool down and dry out, for at least 20 minutes.
In the meantime, chop leeks into slices of around 1.5 cm thick, cutting off the roots and cleaning as you go if any dirt has got stuck between the leaves. Discard the top 1/3 of the leeks, the darker green leaves are a bit tough for this recipe (but can be used to make stock). Spread the leeks out on a tray lined with baking paper, drizzle with olive oil and sea salt and cook for around 40 minutes in the oven. Check on them at around 15 minutes to make sure they are not charring, turning down the oven if need be.
Make the pastry using a blender. Place flour and butter in a blender and mix for around a minute, until butter and flour are the consistency of breadcrumbs. Then add the cold potatoes, whole, along with salt, pepper, grated parmesan cheese and some dried thyme leaves. Pulse on a high speed for a further 30 seconds. At this point, the pastry should have the smooth, white consistency of shortbread batter. Do not over mix. Note that you can also make the pastry by hand, by mashing the potato, rubbing the butter into the flour and then mixing all ingredients together. Wrap the pastry in plastic wrap (or recyclable beeswax wraps as I did, first coating the pastry in a thin layer of flour so it doesn’t stick) and place in fridge for at least 30 minutes to chill.
Once soft to the touch, remove the leeks from the oven, turning it up to 180°C (360°F).
Pre-bake the pastry shell. Take a pie dish with fluted edges of 25cm diameter (I used a pyrex dish). Grease it well, or line it with baking paper if desired. Remove pastry from the fridge, sprinkle some flour (rice flour works very well as it has no gluten) out onto a dry bench and roll it out gently. It will still be quite sticky, so use flour liberally. Then peel the pastry into the dish and press around the edges firmly to remove any air bubbles and push the pastry hard up against the edges to form the rim of the pie. Pierce the base with fork pricks. Then place a sheet of baking paper over it and use some pie weights (either ceramic or real beans work well) to weigh the pastry down well. Cook for 20 minutes, by which stage the edges should be turning golden brown and puffing up a little. Then remove the pie weights and cook for a further 10 minutes, so that the base of the pie also cooks properly.
Place goat’s cheese, milk, eggs, garlic cloves, seasoning and thyme leaves into blender and blend until smooth. This is your pie filling. It will be quite liquid.
Assemble the pie. Remove the pastry shell from the oven. Carefully lay out the leek pieces on the base of the pie, keeping them intact if possible, then pour over the filling. The tops of the leeks should just be poking through. Sprinkle over fresh thyme leaves. Place back into the oven and cook for a further 20 minutes, or until the filling is set.
Garnish with sprigs of fresh thyme. Serve hot with a fresh green salad, balsamic vinegar and good olive oil.
The story behind the recipe
Leeks are a winter vegetable and yet they also seem to herald Spring. I am already turning towards Spring. It is their colour I love. The palest tender white turning to a darker, dusty bluegreen. Leeks are to onions what celeriac is to celery. They are subtler, more refined. It seems the Romans thought so too, because they probably brought leeks with them to Wales, gifting the Welsh their famous national vegetable. Leeks are also fussier than onions to prepare, needing more attention to remove the dirt from between their layers of leaves, needing longer to cook to reach peak melt-in-your-mouthness.
I played with many possible titles for this piece. Leek rhymes with so many things. A peek at leeks. A leek treat. A week of leeks. Sneak in some leeks. But they all felt too frivolous. Leeks are serious, adult, wanting to talk about Nietzsche over candlelight, to look you deep into the eyes until you know you are seen. Leeks make promises that you know will be kept.
When I lived in Paris, there was a nondescript cafe that I went to only for its quiche. It sat on a warming tray and you could choose the piece you wanted, put it on a small white plate, place that on a greasy plastic hospital tray, pay an extra euro for a handful of salad greens, ask for a glass to pour yourself tap water. Nothing about that cafe was particularly nice, it was crammed with too many tables, as if two floors had been compressed into one, too full of voices, rising to be heard over the lunchtime hubbub. But you could always find a chair to squeeze into, apologising as you knocked a neighbour’s coat to the ground. And they had a vegetarian quiche every day. Usually it was goat’s cheese and butternut, sometimes it had leeks. I rarely questioned the ingredients, rarely tried to pull it apart as I do with most foods, although sometimes I wondered if the filling was made with pure cream. It tasted as if it was. I wouldn’t let myself go there too often, sure that it could not be good for me, the same way I had decided croissants were strictly a weekend treat. But then, on a Friday at the end of a long week, I would find myself walking in the direction of the cafe for lunch, sit by myself, not speaking to anyone, not thinking much at all, and quietly eat a piece of quiche.
The thing about a tart, a good tart, is that it seems like it was born that way. The components fit so completely together, so simply, that you forget that they were once separate, barely pause to contemplate as you fork clouds of it to your mouth. A perfect meld of fluted edged pastry, creamy smooth filling, tessellating vegetables. That is perhaps its joy, to belong so surely together, to be so sure of its wholeness.
Potato and leek pie has a long history and this is a riff on that history. I used a potato pastry recipe adapted from The Hairy Bikers. I tried varying the ratios a little, but increasing the flour and butter did not make for better pastry. The most important component is probably to get the right kind of potato, which need to be floury, not waxy. You want to use mashing potatoes. I also played with putting in the goat’s cheese mix first and then the leeks, for a sort of tarte tatin look. It was nice, but not as delicious, because the goat’s mixture makes the pastry (never particularly robust in the first place) a bit soggy.
This is a special occasion tart. There is no way around it. Making tarts take time and this one is extra faff because of the potatoes. Make it easier on yourself by boiling the potato (or even making the pastry) the day before, or do it in fits and starts on a day you are already at home. You don’t need to be in the kitchen for two hours, but there’s at least 30 minutes of active preparation time. I made the pastry and the leeks in the morning one day, letting them sit until I was ready to make the pie in the evening, when it took me an hour to cook the pastry shell and then the pie. On another day I made the tart again and it took me two hours from start to finish.
But it is a lovely thing to make. It feels like magic whipping up the potatoes into pastry. The dough comes together so quickly you’ve barely taken a breath before you are jumping forward to switch the blender off. It looks as I imagine manna to be, pieces of it might have fallen like plump gnocchi from the heavens, God’s ambrosia. And the tart looks so beautiful when it comes directly out of the oven, your house filling up with the smell of it, the caress of caramelised leeks creeping into every room and lingering. Here it is again, pictured on a tablecloth that was embroidered by my Great-Grandmother (and completed by an Aunt, who sent it to me as a superlatively lovely Christmas gift).
Happy cooking this week!
Amelia.
Loved your writing Amelia, and what a lovely way to use a cloth made by the women in our family. So proud to be your Aunt! xx
An epically delicious dish. I had the privilege of testing it first had. Utterly moreish!