Elegant Praline Pear Tart

I can’t let the autumn season pass without featuring a recipe using pears. When tucked into a rich pastry shell along with a praline glaze, we have a simple but elegant pear dessert. The pears shine. This tart recipe is not too sweet, full of flavor. All the stone fruit available in autrumn — peaches, plums, cherries, apricots — have unique aromatic flavor qualities. I love them all. Pears, especially, make great snacking. However, my goal today was to create an easy pastry dessert using pears. I wanted something simple, yet elegant. It turned out to be a challenging project and took a number of recipe attempts with different types of pears, combinatons of fillings and toppings. I finally succeeded and here’s my final result. “Elegant Praline Pear Tart” tastes great! I hope you like it, too.

Praline Pear Tart Recipe

This dessert is just right for a holiday meal especially when served with ice cream or whipped topping. I even found a little mint from my yard garden to garnish the tart.

For this pear tart recipe, the crust is my favorite rich, flaky pie crust pastry. I use it for “Classic Deep Purple Plum Pie” and it works well for tarts, too. I mix it up in a food processor; it takes just a few minutes to mix up and roll out the crust. The D’Anjou pears are simply peeled, sliced and layered onto the pastry shell on top of chopped pecans. I topped the pears with a syrup made of melted butter and brown sugar. When the tart bakes, the brown sugar makes a praline-like glaze. The recipe is easy. Getting ripe but not overly ripe and mushy pears is the trick.

About Pear Types

I love ripe, juicy and flavorful pears for a snack. Like other stone fruit, pears grown in the USA are harvested for only few short months in autumn. Let’s make the best of this fruit whiile they are still in season. Pear varieties vary greatly in juciness — or crispness — and sweetness. Selecting the best pear for the recipe and intended use is one of the challenges of cooking with pears. For snacking — a sweet, juicy pear is better, who wants one which is a hard as a rock. For cooking, a sweet, soft pear which falls apart isn’t ideal. A firmer pear is better.

Pears (except for Asian pears) will ripen in a warm spot on a kitchen counter after you bring them home from the grocery store. Once they begin to become soft (but before they start to bruise), transfer to the refrigerator to stop the ripening process. So purchase pears several days to a week in advance and let them ripen up; an unripe pear lacks aromatic flavor and won’t be good in this recipe.

From left to right are: Bosc, D’Anjou, Asian and Bartlett pears.

Bartlett and Comice (not shown) pears are juicy, soft and aromatic. Let’s snack on these. On the other hand, Bosc pears are crisp and not as sweet. Great for cooking. Red and Green D’Anjou pears are somewhere in between. Asian pears are crisp and fragrant and are picked when fully ripe. Use them for cooking or eating raw. Asian pears are super-expensive — pay attention to what you are purchasing.

These D’Anjou pears were quite green and hard when I purchased them. They lacked that great pear aromatic flavor. Yes, these pears had to sit on my kitchen counter for several days (actually 5 days) and wait for me to make the recipe. And that’s the challenge of pears — getting them to ripen when you want to make the recipe!

For this recipe, short, squatty pears work better, especially when using a smaller (9.5″ diameter) tart pan. That was another advantage of the D’Anjou pears.

Recipe

This pear tart recipe has three layers:

• The crust of the tart,
• Fresh D’Anjou pear slices arranged on the tart shell over pecan pieces sprinkled around,
• A praline glaze made of brown sugar and butter.

Rich Tart Crust

For the crust, I’m made an easy but rich pie pastry. The ingredients are flour, real butter (not margarine), a little sugar and salt. It contains just a small amount of sugar, which is unusual for a pie crust, but this really addes to the “shortbread” flavor of the crust. Although making a homemade pie shell may seem daunting, I’ve done this many times. My recipe always works like a charm — just measure the ingredients accurately (we’re not T.V. chefs here who just throw in a pinch of this or that).

A food processer is a necessity for making pie shells and tart pastry, in my opinion. Here’s what I do. Pulse together the flour, sugar and salt in a large food processor bowl. Then cut cold butter into chunks (the butter should not be soft or melted). Add the butter chunks through the shute and pulse with short on and off spurts until the butter is cut into small specks. Add exactly 1/4 cup ice water down the shute and let the food processor run until the pastry pulls away from the edges into a ball.

Transfer to a well floured pastry board or cutting board. Shape into a round disk. (The tart shell is round — this gives us a head start when rolling out the crust.) Use a rolling pin to gently roll the pastry into a circle about an one inch larger than the tart pan. Add flour to the board as needed so the dough doesn’t stick. Roll out from the center of the dough disk — not the edges — and rotate the disk around to that the dough is even in thickness.

When the dough is rolled out, gently wrap the dough around the rolling pin (see photo on right). Transfer to the tart shell. Gently push the dough into the tart pan — do not stretch the dough (or it will shrink during baking). Trim the edges of the dough. You’ll have some scraps left over, so if your tart pan is larger that a 9.5″ diameter, it will still work.

This tart shell can be made several days ahead of time. So, either place the tart shell in the refrigerator and store or finish the tart immediately. My 9.5″ diameter tart pan has a removable bottom which makes it easy to remove the tart from the pan after baking.

When you are ready to finish the tart, pre-bake tart shell for 10 minutes in a 350 degree oven. To keep the tart shell from shrinking (yes, it will shrink), I cut a parchment circle to fit in the bottom of the tart pan. Use a knife to trace the circle (see photo on left) and then cut out with sissors. Place parchment circle on the pastry dough in the tart pan. Add dried beans (such as Great Northern beans or navy beans), spreading them in a single layer completely to all the edges. Next pre-bake the shell.

Pecan and Pear Layer

To give this tart additional crunch and a praline-like aromatic flavor, I added chopped pecans around the inside edges of the tart shell. Along with the glaze, it gives a “praline” taste to the tart. First toast pecans for 5 minutes in the oven. Then chop them and sprinkle in a circle around in the pre-baked tart pastry shell. (When the pecans were sprinkled on top of the pears — they burnt during baking.)

The filling of the tart is simply made of peeled D’Anjou pear slices arranged attractively in the tart shell and covered with the brown sugar glaze.

Peeling the pears is the tricky part of this recipe. However, I have discovered a system which works wonderfully with ripe or crisp pears which are not too, too soft. I was able to peel off the skin of the pears without removing huge chunks of the flesh. My secret is using a wide vegetable and fruit peeler. You hold it differently from a traditional peeler — this one is so much easier to use — why didin’t I know about it sooner?

Praline Glaze

The glaze which is spread on top of the pear slices adds a little sweetness to this tart. I made the glaze by cooking brown sugar, butter and a little water to make a syrup. Watch and stir the syrup constantly when it is cooking on the stove. The brown sugar can easily become super-concentrated, burn and become hard as a rock. If this happens — start over and make another batch of glaze. (And good luck getting the burnt syrup out of the pot. — Fill the pot with water and let the sugar dissolve.)

Let cool and carefully remove from tart pan and slide onto a serving platter. That’s it! A simple pear tart. Delicious.

This is a great recipe for showcasing pears. The crust can be made several days ahead of time. Purchase the pears ahead of time, too, and monitor their ripeness. Transfer to refrigerator when the pears begin to soften (before they begin to bruise) to stop the pears from ripening further. Make the tart the day of the holiday meal — or even the day before the holiday meal. This tart makes a nice, “lite” ending to a heavy meal. Enjoy the flavors of autumn and my recipe!

Reference:

Pear Varieties