Alright, folks! This is my first blog post–my sister has so generously offered me a slot–and I couldn’t be happier to have the opportunity to share this one with more people. I spent something like four weeks dreaming of making this recipe, enticed by the elegant ‘screen’ of Parmesan-dappled asparagus in the NYT photo and its intriguing combination of ingredients. Of course it’s Spring–the best of times to savor asparagus! The only thing stopping me was the questionable availability of butter-made puff pastry, i.e the real stuff. Turns out the local Stop & Shop stocks nothing but sad and inedible soybean imitators–even in normal times–but the local natural food chain FoodWorks chooses to grace their freezer aisle with Dufour, the real stuff made with actual butter. The heightened licorice glory of fresh tarragon, luckily, is apparently not lost on Stop and Shop, as it is readily stocked. With the ingredients bought (albeit with the serviceable crème fraîche substitution of a 1:1 of sour and heavy cream), I proceeded to get cookin’. There’s nothing tricky about this recipe, although the assembly requires a certain amount of faith: heaping a thick layer of the crème mixture onto a thin rectangle of puff pastry with nothing more than a lightly scored border feels wrong and the stuff of overflowing disaster until you remember that even a single egg works wonders when it comes to binding. Keep your faith, because the result is superb–the inscrutable interplay of lemon, garlic, goat-iness and tarragon in the crème mixture elevates this dish from a simple cheesy tart to something approaching the gestalt expected with 5-star restaurant fare. For a recipe requiring less than an hour of my time, I don’t know that I’ve ever been more impressed. And a nice discovery about the crust: if you get Dufour, the size is correct out of the box–no rolling required!
Will Platt
