Sophie Hansen shares her leek, orange and hot honey tart recipe, perfect for a light lunch or cut into small cubes to pass around at parties.
This humble-looking tart is a flavour bomb wrapped up in golden spelt puff pastry.
The leeks are mellow and caramelised, while the golden filling is tangy from the lemon. The Carême Wholemeal Spelt Puff Pastry is flakey, buttery and perfect. Finish the dish with a hot honey drizzle, a little orange zest, and extra Parmesan for tang and salt.
I love this with a green salad for lunch but it’s also great cut into smaller cubes and passed around at parties.
Sophie xx
Serves 6
Prep time 15 mins
Cook time 40 mins
445g pack Carême Wholemeal Spelt Puff Pastry, defrosted
3 leeks, trimmed and sliced into 2cm thick discs
3 tbsp olive oil
2 eggs
1/2 cup (125ml) cream
1/2 cup parmesan cheese, finely grated
Zest of one lemon
1/2 tsp sea salt (or to taste)
2 tbsp fermented chilli honey (see recipe below)
Zest of one orange
1 egg
2 tbsp cream
Preheat oven to 200C (fan-forced).
Arrange the leek discs on a baking tray and drizzle with the olive oil. Season with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper then roast for about 15 minutes or until soft and beginning to take on some colour.
Meanwhile, to make the filling, combine all ingredients (but save half of the cheese) in a bowl and whisk until smooth. In a separate bowl, make the extra egg and two tablespoons of cream together.
Line a baking tray with baking paper and place the pastry on top. Score a border around the edges, about 3cm all the way around.
Spread the filling across the base of the pastry (within the scored edges) and then arrange the leeks on top. Press the pastry border down on all sides to form an edge. Brush this with the egg wash.
Place in the oven for 20 minutes or until the pastry is puffed and golden and the filling has also puffed and coloured up nicely.
Once it comes out of the oven, drizzle with the honey, sprinkle over the orange zest and finish with remaining Parmesan.
Serve warm or at room temperature.
Instead of the roasted leeks, you could sub in roasted zucchini and hot smoked salmon; asparagus and goat’s curd; caramelised onion and thyme; or, roasted pumpkin and beetroot.
3-4 long red chillies, thinly sliced (I include the seeds but you can remove them if you prefer less heat)
1 cup good Australian honey
Pack the chillies in a jar and pour over the honey. Mix and cover the jar with a layer of clean chux or muslin (so any gasses produced by the fermentation process can escape). Leave for a couple of weeks, the honey will loosen and begin to bubble as the fermentation starts.
Once you’re happy with the flavour (keep checking every week or so), place in the fridge. The heat of the chillies will mellow through this process.
Some kitchen shortcuts are really worth taking. Good all-butter pastry is one of them. But the only brand that does it properly in Australia is Carême Pastry.
When I make pastry at home, I only use butter. So does Carême. All their pastries are preservative free and made with proper butter, not vegetable or palm oils which you see in lots of pastries in the frozen section of the supermarkets.
If this sounds like an ad, well, it is! I approached Carême to see if they’d come on as an advertising partner with Galah because I love their products so much. They are a family-run business based in the Barossa Valley – 100 per cent Australian made and owned – making high-quality, delicious pastry sheets that taste as if I had made them myself. I want to sing their praises.
If you’re wondering where you can find Carême pastries, just head to their website. Click on “home cook” then “where to buy”. You enter your postcode and it tells you the closest stockists.
Thank you to Carême for being a partner with Galah.
