[food] experimental savoury tarte tatin

[kaberett]

Inspiration and advice drawn from:

• Leith's How to... make puff pastry
• spiced root veg tarte tatin
• Marcus Wareing's roasted onion tarte tatin
• Ottolenghi's leek-nut roast tatin

Ingredients
A Quantity of puff pastry (just made 250g flour's worth, and turned the trimmings into cheese straws) ~4 beetroot (two large and two small...), peeled and cut into wedges
red onion (4 tiny or fewer larger), topped and halved but not peeled or tailed
1 parsnip, finely grated
~2 leeks (I used two medium and one small), finely chopped
pack of pre-cooked chestnuts (180g), roughly chopped
butter (lots)
balsamic vinegar
star anise
thyme

Method

1. (Read through the rest of the instructions to work out your timing, then...) Heat oven to 180°C (fan).
2. Make Some Puff Pastry. Or buy it! (See notes for why this is step one.)
3. Line a largeish oven-safe pan with greaseproof. Add a large lump of butter, the onions (face down), and the beetroot. Wrap the greaseproof over the top, add an oven-safe lid, and roast for about an hour.
4. (Chop the leek and grate the parsnip, then...) Add another knob of butter to a frying pan and heat gently. Saute leek and parsnip together for around ten minutes, until softened. Remove from heat, add the chopped chestnuts and thyme, and set aside.
5. Remove the beetroot pan from the oven. Remove the onion halves from the pan. Add a couple of tablespoons of balsamic vinegar to the pan. Remove the dry skin from the onions, chop into wedges depending on their size, and trim as much of the root as seems necessary. Swirl the butter and balsamic around in the pan (still on the greaseproof!), then arrange the beetroot wedges and onion (cut-side down) in an Aesthetically Pleasing Fashion, with a few decorative star anise interspersed for good measure. (I had a tiny central wheel of beetroot surrounded by red onion surrounded by the larger beetroot wedges around the edge...)
6. When you are ready to bake: heat the oven to 200°C fan. Decant the leek mixture on top of the Arranged Beetroots. Tuck the pastry in around the edge of the veg. Transfer the whole lot to the oven. Cook for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 180°C (ish) (again). Cook for a further 20-40 minutes, depending on how it looks. When the pastry is done, let it cool for a few minutes and then invert.

Notes

Grey Le Creuset thing works excellently for this.

If making puff pastry, the greaseproof paper used to flatten the butter can be a sufficiently large sheet to also line the dish for the oven.

I actually set the leek going a while before adding the parsnip, which also seemed to work fairly well and may be Generally Wiser though it's not what Ottolenghi (who supplied this bit of the recipe) recommends.

Puff benefits from being rolled out, cut to size, and then stuck back in the fridge for a little before going into the oven. The big blue-glazed plates fit very neatly over the grey thing for inversion, and can go in the fridge as an unterlag upon which to rest the pastry.

I tried following the recipe suggestions of baking for ~40 minutes at 170°C fan, which was Clearly Inadequate, and wound up putting the temperature up to ~220°C to get it to actually cook -- and I think the inner layers of pastry would have done Better with the hotter temperature to begin with.

We think the parsnip was responsible for what one might otherwise describe as a je ne sais quoi, and were overall extremely pleased with this! More faff than I am likely to bother with day-to-day, but fun for showing off.

And the pastry trimmings made excellent billowing cheese straws, which I considered Delightful.