Smoked Salmon and Watercress Tart

Hola! So, I finally got around to christening my new kitchen here in Madrid. I was flicking through my copy of Gordon Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food, looking for something perhaps a little more fitting for my new life in Spain, but I didn’t really have much luck. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, other than a fondness for various mysterious bits of pig, British pub food doesn’t really have that much in common with the Spanish diet. Anyway, I finally settled on this recipe for smoked salmon and watercress tart, for no other reason than I at least fancied my chances of picking up all of the ingredients easily at my local El Corte Ingles supermercado.

This would be my second attempt at one of Gordon’s tart recipes, and as the first one, an asparagus and spring onion tart, was so utterly delicious, I had pretty high hopes for how this one would turn out. Despite being in Spain and away from readily available, traditional British ingredients, I do plan on trying to keep this blog as authentic as possible. As such, I was particularly pleased to find some nice quality (read expensive) Scottish smoked salmon in the supermarket’s chiller cabinet (although it turned out to be a discovery I would later regret). You can see the salmon below, along with the other ingredients of watercress, crème fraiche, lemons, eggs, flour and butter.

I started things off by making up the pastry. Up until now, I have been fairly lucky with my Ramsay’s pub food pastry attempts. I have to admit to you that this is far from the norm. I have a pretty awful track record with pastry, and usually resort to buying the pre-made stuff from the shops. Still, after my last few attempts had gone so well, I felt like I had nothing to fear.

I added plain flour and a pinch of salt to my blender along with some chopped up cubes of butter. After a quick whizz the ingredients had come together to resemble coarse breadcrumbs.

I emptied the contents of blender into a large bowl and added in a few tablespoons of cold water and slowly brought the mixture together. After lightly needed the dough into a smooth ball, I wrapped it up in clingfilm and left it to rest in the fridge to firm up. So far, so good.

After half an hour, I took the dough from the fridge and attempted to roll it out. It should end up roughly the thickness of a one pound coin and large enough to line a large tart tin. I say attempted, because this is where it all started to go a bit wrong. My first pass at rolling out the dough ended up with the pastry stuck firmly to the work surface (dough too wet, not enough flour on the countertop?). So I had to quickly scramble the dough back together and try again. I had a bit better luck the second time around, but my pastry still ended up a rather sad looking patchwork of fixes and plugs.

A little disheartened, I lined the tart base with baking paper and dried beans and popped into the oven to bake ‘blind’ for about 20 minutes.

After blind baking, its best to remove the paper and the beans and give the pastry case another 5 minutes of oven time until the base is properly cooked.

Once baked, you can use a sharp knife to trim around the edge of the tart case to tidy up the overhanging edges and at the same time brush the pastry with a little egg white.

Now for the filling. First of all, I grated the zest of a couple of lemons into a large mixing bowl.

Into this, I added three large eggs, crème fraiche and lemon juice before lightly beating the mixture and seasoning well with salt and pepper.

To assemble the tart, I first spread out the watercress leaves evenly over the base of the pastry case.  Next, I roughly tore up the smoked salmon into smaller pieces and scattered this on top.

Finally, I poured on the egg and crème fraiche mixture until it reached just below the rim of the tart.

And that was it. All that was left was for me to pop the tart back into the oven to bake for 45 minutes, until the filing had set and the top had gone a nice golden colour. It came out of the oven looking pretty good.

After leaving it to cool for ten minutes, I served a generous slice of the tart for supper, along with a few sprinklings of left over watercress. What do you think? Well, maybe it didn’t look as pretty as the picture in the cookbook, but I was fairly pleased with how it had turned out. At least my mish-mash of pastry was well hidden by the scrummy looking, creamy filling.

However, to be honest, I was a little disappointed with the tart’s taste. The Scottish smoke salmon was incredibly strong, its flavour really overpowered the other ingredients. Not that the tart was unpleasant (I love smoked salmon!), I just felt that overall the flavours of the dish were somewhat out of balance. I’m sure you could use a more gently smoked salmon instead but, while that would help, I cant help feeling that this tart recipe doesn’t quite hit the heights of the earlier asparagus and spring onion one. If you find yourself poking through the cookbook wondering which tart to make, I would have to recommend that you try the asparagus one instead.

So, my first Madrid recipe wasn’t quite the smashing success I was hoping for, but still, onwards and upwards! Coming up over the next few posts: some thoughts on Spanish pinchos, an old school dinner favourite and a Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food Extra recipe. Stay tuned!