Easy Treacle Tart Recipe

Hello Bakers! I'm Chef Gemma Stafford and this week on Bigger Bolder Baking we are making this traditional treacle tart that I grew up with. Here's how to do it. The first thing we're going to do is make our pastry. This is my regular pie crust. It works perfectly for this recipe. In my bowl I have some all-purpose flour. I have a little bit of powdered sugar in my pie crust. When making pie crusts, I like to use powdered sugar because it dissolves into the other ingredients much better. A little bit of salt in our pastry always. Lovely. Give that a little mixy-mix with my hands because I forgot my spatula. And then here, the secret ingredient to anybody's pastry is cold-cubed butter. Salted, good quality, really delicious stuff. Now you can use a pastry blender to do this or you can go in by hand like I like to do. But go in and rub it in with your fingers. And the rubbing in technique is simply just picking up the butter and the flour, rubbing it between your fingers like this, combining the two until the butter kind of breaks down and you get big lumps of butter and small lumps of butter. Now it's really important that the butter is cold because you want cold butter to make pastry. It makes all the difference. That's what gives you a lovely flaky pastry. Cold butter going into a hot oven. Two minutes later you'll have something that looks like this. Kind of lumpy, coarse breadcrumbs. Some lumps of butter, some bigger, some smaller. This is perfect. Now let's talk our wet ingredients for our pastry. Sometimes people only use water to make a pastry. That's totally fine. I like to add a little bit of extra richness and fat into it so I've got an egg yolk here. And then I'm going to add in a few tablespoons of very cold water. One of the keys to pastry making is cold ingredients. Cold butter, cold flour, cold water. Everything cold. And then pour it into our dry ingredients. And then what I like to do is go in with my hand and bring it together. There is a chance that you will need a little bit more water if that is the case. Just make sure you don't add it in too early. It is perfectly fine for a pastry to be on the drier side because it will get wetter as it sits in the fridge. There we go. This is perfect. Once it all comes together in a ball, I'm just going to give it a little quick knead to get it nice and smooth. So with any pastry crust that you're making, preferably one of my pastry crusts, you want to whip it up, wrap it up, pop it in the fridge, at least 20 minutes. I like to say half an hour minimum. During this time the gluten will relax, it will be easy to roll. Also, if it's on the drier side it will get a little bit wetter so factor that in. So I'm just going to pop this into the fridge for now. Okay, so I just popped on my oven and my pastry is nice and chilled. Just so you know, you can make this pastry up to 24 hours in advance. Also make pastry freezes, especially around this time of year, fall, the holiday season, I always have pastry pie crust in my freezer. Freezes perfectly. Here we go. Now here's what we want to do. Roll it out into a nice big circle. Probably going for around 11 inches because I have a 9 inch pie pan. I get asked a lot for more traditional recipes that I grew up with in Ireland and I wanted to share this one with you because it's not so well known but it is so delicious and so simple. There we go. This looks great. I'm going to bring in my pie pan. Let me show you a little trick how you can move pastry easily. Fold it in half. Fold it like this. Bring in your pie pan. Unfold it. Don't worry if there's a few creases, we can sort those out. And then unfold it again. Now just gently push your pastry into your pie pan. If it's not absolutely perfect or you don't think it's perfect, you can cover up any little holes. I could use a little bit more pastry over here. I'm going to just trim it up a little bit. Like so. We're going to take our two fingers, we're going to bring in this one here and do it like that. This is a very simple crimp. Aw, look at that. It starts to look like a sunflower. And we're going to dock the bottom and this just helps your pastry get nice and crisp. Docking means to pierce it with a fork. Now we are going to blind bake our crust. Here I have a round of parchment paper. I use this all the time. We're going to lay this in our pie crust. Now what we have to do is weigh down our pie crust. Now there are some things out there called baking beads, which you do not need. Please do not buy baking beads. What you can use instead without having to spend much more money is you can use sugar, you can use lentils, you can use beans, you can use, if you have a fava bean, pack it in your cupboard and you don't like fava beans anymore, use those. I like to use sugar because I always have it. And it fills it right up to the top. I'm going to glaze the edges of our pie crust. You want to get a lovely, shiny crust. Okay, my oven just pinged. It's nice and hot. Let's get this in there to start baking. So while your pie crust is blind baking, we're going to start by making the filling. So I have a heavy bottom saucepan. Over like a medium low heat. And into this I'm going to add in my golden syrup. Into the golden syrup, we're going to add in some lemon zest, which gives your tart lovely sharpness and flavor. And then a little bit of lemon juice. Give those a little mix. And just for two minutes, let this mixture get nice and warm. Okay, so our mixture is quite liquidy. It smells very fragrant. So I'm going to remove it from the stovetop and bring it over to the counter. So here we go. You can also do this step in the microwave just an FYI. So now into this mixture, what we're going to do is add some breadcrumbs. Now these are fresh breadcrumbs, not dried breadcrumbs. You want fresh for this recipe because that's what's intended. You don't want dried. You can easily make your own breadcrumbs and I have a video that actually is really popular, especially this time of year when people are making stuffings. So definitely check that out if you need to know. So add your breadcrumbs into this mixture and what we're going to do is just let that sit for five minutes. Let the breadcrumbs soak up that liquid and then we'll add in the rest of our ingredients. So now eagle-eyed bakers might notice that this is called treacle tart and it's not golden syrup tart. Treacle in Ireland and in England is actually molasses and that would make for a very bitter tart so they changed it to golden syrup which is kind of like caramel-y and smooth and sweet. You know, much milder and just a more pleasant taste. So our timer went off for 15 minutes. Now come here to me, I want you to see what we're going to do here. Pull out your pie. Carefully, mind your hands, remove your pie weights and all we're going to do now is just let this bit bake a little bit more for like three to five minutes. We just want to get it a little bit browner and then we're going to pour our filling in on top. Okay, once your breadcrumbs have soaked up a little bit, I'm going to crack in an egg because it has cooled down now. This is going to help to set our pie and this is almost like a golden syrup custard. And then we're going to pour in some heavy whipping cream which also helps to set it and it also makes it delicious. That's it, that's our filling. Could not be simpler. Okay, I'm going to go check on our pie crust, I think it's almost done. There you go, it just took us a few minute extra and our pie crust is ready. This is perfect, you want it pale baked. The outside is a little bit golden brown but not too much. So go ahead and pour in your prepared filling in here. You want a shallow pie pan for this because it's not a ton of filling and traditionally, especially in Ireland, this actually would have been done in kind of a deep plate, not even in a pie pan. Okay, we have our oven still on so we're ready to go here. Let's get it in and finish baking. So bake your pie the same temperature you did your blind bake, 375 degrees Fahrenheit, 190 degrees Celsius for roughly 25-30 minutes just until that jiggle in the middle is set. There's our timer and our pie is done. Look at that, it looks lovely, lovely golden brown and the center is set. This is a sweet pie, there's no doubt about it. So I like to balance that with a little bit of freshly whipped cream. The filling is sweet, it has a little tone of caramel, lovely fresh flavor from the lemon zest. It's simple, it's delicate, it's elegant, sophisticated, a lovely buttery flaky crust on the bottom. This is my type of comfort food, food that I grew up with, food that is simple but it just makes you feel good on the inside and out. I absolutely adore this dessert. It reminds me of home. If you'd like to see more traditional Irish desserts then stick around, I've got tons for you to watch. Thanks so much for being here and I'll see you back here again really soon.