• Welcome to 101 Cookbooks, my recipe journal. I primarily feature healthy, vegetarian recipes - with the occasional sweet treat thrown in. To subscribe simply enter your email address, this way you'll never miss a recipe.

Add RSS Feed

I love the 'Letters: You Asked for It' section at the front of Gourmet magazine. It is the equivalent of a letter to the editors section where most of the letters are asking the magazine to help track down a recipe. Gourmet helps the person find the recipe and then includes it in the section. For example in this case, a woman named Sandra Hersh wrote in asking about an 'amazing' chocolate hazelnut tart she tried at a restaurant called Mamma Maria in Boston, they published the recipe, and now it's my turn to try it.

The recipe is for a tart with a slightly sweet hazelnut crust and a thick dark chocolate filling.

Let me start off by talking about the smell of this crust. The sweet vanilla hazelnut scent that was coming off the crust while I was pre-baking it was amazing. I was convinced nothing could taste as good as that smelled. The crust itself was simple to put together because, bless them, the instructions are for a pressed crust instead of one that is rolled out. I am a big fan of pressed crusts, I like the structure they lend to the tart, and I also like how they are often taste like a thin cookie underneath the filling.

Other crust issues: I seem to have remedied my shrinking crust problem with the pie weights I bought a while back, but the crust was starting to rise a bit after I took out the weights, so I took the initiative to poke some holes in the bottom of it with a fork.

The filling was a breeze to make. I heated up a bit of milk, sugar, and salt. Poured it into the bowl with chopped chocolate-whisked in the yolks, a few other ingredients, and voila, it was ready to go into the shell. The recipe called for creme fraiche in the filling, I should note here, that I used sour cream instead. To my knowledge there is no creme fraiche w/in walking distance of my house, and I wasn't going to lose my parking space---making my own was out of the question-unless someone out there knows how to make a five minute creme fraiche. At any rate, I think the sour cream was delicious, but I will try creme fraiche next time. I also used a good quality bittersweet chocolate.

Baking the tart was uneventful for the most part. It cooked in a 325 oven. I waited about 35 minutes until it firmed up just a bit in the middle, but was alarmed when I took it out of the oven and it started to crack all over the top. Somehow, the cracks just went away as the tart collapsed a bit and cooled. I'm sure some of you cooking science people can tell me why that happens.

The tart really firmed up a lot after spending a few hours in the refrigerator. Think about the densest darkest chocolate mouse you can imagine--that is what the inside of this tart is like. I was able to cut a perfect wedge with no oozing. The filling was smooth, sweet, tasty, and extremely rich. The crust was nicely structured, but could stand to be sweeter for my tastes. It was all about the hazelnut flavor as well. If you like the classic chocolate hazelnut combination, this tart has your name on it.

To feature an actual recipe taken from a cookbook, it is best to request permission from the publisher or author. In the early days on 101 Cookbooks, I would tell people where to find the recipe, but not feature the recipe itself. Eventually I began to request permission to run the actual recipes, but this wasn't one of them. The majority of entries on 101 Cookbooks will have the recipes attached, this just happens to be one of the ones that doesn't. My apologies!

Link: Chocolate Hazelnut Tart (Gourmet)

Print Recipe

Never miss a recipe!
Enter your email address to subscribe to 101 Cookbooks via email:

1 Comment Print-friendly Recipe Email this Recipe

Add to del.icio.usAdd to StumbleUponShare on Facebook