Beetroot and Squash houndstooth tart (vegan)

Hello 🙂 I hope your week had a good start, or at least on okay one. 

Today I am posting the recipe for this beetroot crust butternut squash savoury tart, which is a super healthy recipe and it is also very comforting. 

I know I often overshare about my love for films, walks, cats etc, but I think I had never told you about my love for fashion. It started pretty late, well at least my awareness of it started pretty late – when I was a teenager my idea of fashion was wearing an Eskimo and a dress on my jeans, so it took me a while to consider something else. I associate my love for fashion to two things: sewing and houndstooth. I think it’s the print that appears with a higher frequency in my wardrobe and I just love it, it’s both quirky and classy and timeless. So I decided to dedicate one of my tarts to this pattern. 

Also – I grew up calling that pattern pied de poule, which is how it’s called in France and in Italy – is it called like that also somewhere else? I want to know!

First, I thinly sliced ~7 small beets and did my houndstooth cutouts. I hand cut one and I used it as a template for the others. The beets leftovers were cooked and went in the crust, to avoid eating anything. After blind baking my beetroot crust, I blended the squash with the other ingredients to create a smooth and silky cream, which I have spread evenly in the pastry shell. Then I laid my beets on top to create the design and baked for 15 more minutes. Et voila 🙂 I love how the different beet slices had different hues and that creates much more movement than I expected – I never use filters, I mostly use Lightroom to post produce my images, and I was shocked by how packed the colour was in this one O_O nature can be truly astonishing. 

Ingredients and Procedure:

Crust:

180g oven roasted beetroot, blended

2 tbsp seeds

60g chickpea flour 

200g buckwheat flour

100g all purpose flour – you can use a GF one too or go full buckwheat

Water in tbsp – 100ml

Salt

Mix the beetroot with the seeds and the salt and the flours. Then add the water slowly and possibly in tbsp: even a little can go a long way in terms of making your pastry too sticky – we don’t want that to happen otherwise the tart will have a soggy bottom. Blind bake at 175C fan for 15’, then remove the baking beans and continue baking for 20’. Remove from oven. 

Filling

400g oven roasted squash 

110g smoked tofu 

2 tbsp tahini 

1 tbsp safe

1 tbsp balsamic 

Salt and pepper

1 tbsp coriander seeds, toasted in a pan

1 tbsp oil

1 tbsp oat milk 

After having baked the squash, blend it with the other ingredients to form a smooth paste.

Spread the filling in the tart, decorate with the sliced beet shapes and finish baking at 175C for 10-15 minutes. The crust comes out perfectly and holds everything very well. I usually bake it on the lower rack of the oven for the last 1o’ to make sure that it will not have a soggy bottom, ever! Otherwise, eat immediately if you like raw beets, just sprinkle them with some lemon juice before decorating.