Our berry harvest for this year is basically complete, such as it was. The strawberries will have another batch of flowers later, and the raspberries should give us a fall harvest but nothing yet. So these are what I had to play with and I decided to make something with them, rather than just eating the berries, also a good option.
The Josta Berries are a Scandinavian cross between Gooseberries and Black Currants, and you can see that they sort of show their heritage, being in size between the two parent fruits. When you cut them open they kind of look like a Gooseberry inside but have the color more like a Black Currant.
Not a huge harvest by any stretch of imagination but I think it’s enough for two tarts, so that’s my goal for the day.
I cut the Gooseberries and Josta Berries in half so they would release all their flavor readily. Tarts don’t cook all that long and I didn’t want under cooked berries.
Then I made a pie crust dough and created two tart crusts. I blind baked the tart crusts first, then added the mixed berries mixture and put it back in the oven to bake some more. They baked for about 25 minutes.
That left me with some pie crust dough to play with while the tarts were baking. Always a good plan to have extra pie crust dough to play with!!
First I roll out the pastry dough, spread soft margarine on top, sprinkled it with white sugar and cinnamon and rolled it up. Then I cut the rolled pie crust dough into roughly one third inch thick slices and baked them for 12 minutes.
They bake at the same temperature as the tarts, which is convenient. And they are done cooking first so of course we had to eat some of them as soon as they cooled enough not to burn.
They are delicate and crisp, so delicious and easy to make.
The berry mixture smells so amazing; it will be very interesting to see what this tastes like because it is a total experiment.
Update! I will definitely be doing this fruit combination again next year to make tarts or maybe even a whole pie. It was berry berry good!!!!
Next year we should have lots and lots of berries to play with, mostly it will be destined for jam and jelly. And if this turns out good, some tarts as well.
I wonder how long it will take our tiny blueberry plants to do something. We need to acidify the soil around them and picked up a mixture to do that today.
Tomorrow we’ll pick all the rest of the peas. I learned something good about those! I added some to a tofu scramble recipe that I make all the time and it turned out to be a really great idea. I’ll do that again, most definitely.