Basmatic Upside Down Tarte

Hey everyone!

I wanted to bring you some salads that weren’t a salad, so I was thinking about all the ingredients you could find in an Italian ish salad and I was thinking, colourful tomatoes, vinegarettes, croutons may be, rocket and feta. Then I started to look into my family recipes and I found a balsamic upside-down tarte which would be easy to turn vegan. So I’ve never made this before but I very much enjoyed it and it’s a more substantial thing to eat than a salad.

Ingredients 

• Rocket

• Tomatoes (three colour)

• White Onion

• Olive Oil

• White Sugar

• Balsamic Vinegar

• Vegan Feta (Greek Style Cheese Sainsburys)

• Basil + Tomato Puree

• Vegan Ready Made Puff Pastry

So the first thing we wanna do is create the tarte filling, so we start by dicing a white onion and cooking it in a drizzle of olive oil. I used one whole onion and it took about fifteen minutes to soften. I added the balsamic vinegar, I used about 5 tbsp and some seasoning, white sugar and it was there to cook out until the alcohol had evaporated and you were left with a sticky and easy drizzle to use later in your tarte.

Next, to create the first part of the salad element, I washed the tomatoes and put aside the balsamic mix, I combined about 70% of the tomatoes with the balsamic and some tomato, basil puree to give it more of a feel that you’re biting a lot of flavours. The balsamic can be too sharp on it’s own and I wanted it to be fruity as well as sharp so it just added that layer.

Next what we do is we pop these in a dish, this is one of my nans and I basically added everything to the dish upside down, so you see the colourful tomatoes at the bottom with onions and balsamic you have the tomato paste layered on top and then the drizzle. I had some leftover puff pastry that was premade so I threw it on top in a circle and pinched the edges down into the dish.

All this took was about 25 minutes on 170 c in the oven and it was bubbling away up the sides perfectly. The pastry was crisp to the touch and absolutely ready to go. So that has to cool before we do anything with it, so I left it and started washing and prepping a rocket salad. Simple, olive oil, vegan greek cheese crushed up, I added some dried cranberries for texture and set it aside for the tarte.

Then all you have to do is use a palette knife and edge the tarte, now completely cooled out the dish and place upside down. The Balsamic soaks into the pastry, revealing the glorious little tomatoes and you place on top of the salad. Take a bite, eat the whole thing.

Let me know if you’d try this at home in the comments!