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Knotweed Custard Tart, With Goat Cheese Mousse

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Knotweed-custard tart

Knotweed season has passed, but here’s a great way to use the sweetened puree of the shoots I mentioned a while ago.

The puree is just a blank slate for whatever you want, eggs can be added like in the recipe here, but there’s really infinite possibilities, for example the knotweed leather (recipe here) as well as some other fun ones I’ve been making I’ll share with you another time.

After the tarts are baked and cooled, you can put whatever you want on them.

After the tarts are baked and cooled, you can put whatever you want on them.

For these tarts, all you need is a few eggs, a crust, and your choice of topping, like meringue, or the goat cheese mousse recipe I’m going to give you.

Knotweed-custard tart

Topping the tarts with meringue is great too.

The fun part is garnishing. The mousse is stiff enough that you can stick all sorts of fun stuff into it without worrying about it’s shape. I used some of the first berries of the season, herbs, flowers, candied angelica stem and leaves.

Knotweed-custard tart
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Knotweed Custard Tart, With Goat Cheese Mousse

Prep Time1 hr
Cook Time2 hrs
Course: Dessert
Cuisine: French
Keyword: Custard, Japanese Knotweed, Tartine
Servings: 6

Ingredients

Sweet tart crust makes enough for 6-8 small tarts

  • 2 1/3 cups cake or pastry flour
  • 1/3 cup white sugar
  • 1/2 pound 2 sticks unsalted butter, chilled and diced 1/2 in
  • 2 egg yolks
  • Ice water as needed
  • Pinch of kosher salt
  • Rice beans or another pie weight

Knotweed filling

  • 2 cup sweetened knotweed puree
  • 2 large eggs

Goat cheese mousse yields about 3 cups

  • 1 cup chevre quark, sheep ricotta, or cream cheese
  • 2 leaves of gelatin you can substitute 1 packet or ~ 2.5 teaspoons powdered gelatin
  • 1/4 cup granulated white sugar
  • 1 cup cream +1/4 cup
  • Pinch of kosher salt
  • Fresh lime juice just a splash

Instructions

Goat Cheese Mousse

  • gently heat the cream and sugar until the sugar is dissolved, then chill, and whip to stiff peaks. Do not over-beat. Bloom the gelatin in ice water for 5 minutes, then add to the cream and heat until melted. Mix in the goat cheese, season to taste with a dash of lime juice, chill and reserve. After the mixture is thoroughly chilled, remove it from the fridge, whisk it gently to loosen the gelatin, then gently fold in 1/3 of the whipped cream, and then the rest. Reserve the mixture, placing it in a pastry bag fitted with a star tip. Keep the mousse refrigerated.

Tarts

  • blend the butter, flour, salt and sugar in a food processor until the texture looks like coarse meal. Lightly beat the egg yolks with a tablespoon or two of the ice water, then add to the flour mixture and mix until just incorporated. Do not overwork the dough, but make sure it's smooth and not crumbly. Form the dough into a 1inch tall square, wrap in plastic and refrigerate to stiffen it until ready to roll.

Baking

  • Preheat the oven to 350. Take a piece of parchment and cut it into a square big enough to fill whatever mold you'll be using to cook the tarts. Roll the dough out until thin, about 1/4 in, then line your tart mold(s) with it, pressing the dough into all the nooks and crannies.
  • Put the on top, then fill the mold with the rice or other pie weights. Bake the tarts shells until browned and crisp, about 15-20 minutes depending on size, then remove and cool.

Knotweed Filling

  • Whisk the knotweed puree with the eggs, then pour into the pre-baked tart shells and cook at 325 until just set, about 10-15 minutes depending on size. Remove the tarts and chill.
  • To serve the tarts, Pipe some of the mousse onto each tart, then garnish with fresh sweet herbs like mint, flowers and berries of your choice, and serve immediately.

Notes

I designed these to be elegant little tarts, enough to serve one or two people each after a meal. You could definitely make a larger tart if you wanted, just remember that the filling and tart shells will need to cook longer, and you make have to lower the oven temperature, or tent it with foil to prevent browning.
The tart molds I used to make these are 6 inch tart shells. You could use whatever you want though, a creme brulee dish, a ramekin, etc, they're all just a means to an end. 

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🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Last entry. I’ve saved t 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Last entry. I’ve saved the smallest, fern gulliest plant for last. 

False Mermaid Weed (Floerkea proserpinacoides) is a good little plant Sam Thayer showed me. It’s tiny, as in all the photos are from me on my belly, in a wet ditch. It’s so small it’s hard to get the camera to even focus on it (see pic with my finger for scale). 

Mermaid weed likes wet areas, like ditches and spots that hold a bit of water (perfect mosquito habitat😁). 

Like chickweed, Floerkia greens are like nature’s Microgreens. They’re in the Limnanthaceae, (a new-ish group of brassicas) and like the Toothwort form earlier this week, you’ll taste a strong mustard-family flavor in a mouthful of their tender stems. 

They’re literally wild mustard sprouts, and, unlike other wild sprouts (garlic mustard 🤬) they stay sprouts, and, they actually taste good. 

It has a wide range over much of the eastern and western U.S., and is listed as secure globally, but is endangered in some states and shouldn’t be disturbed in those places. 

I’m lucky enough to have some large colonies near me so I do clip a few handfuls each year-my annual reward for removing some of the garlic mustard nearby, that, along with atvs, dirt bikes, and contamination from local water pollution, is one of the biggest threats to this tiny green. 

#floerkiaproserpinacoides 
#wildsprouts #mustardsprouts #ferngully #tiny #foraging #mermaid #🧜‍♀️
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Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) are one of the most beautiful harbingers of spring I know, as well as one of the most delicious. 

They’re in the Borage family, along with the namesake plant, Comfrey (which I only eat a few flowers of occasionally) and Honeywort. 

The flavor of the greens, like borage, has a rich flavor some people might describe as mushroomy or fishy, but after a just a few moments of cooking (30-60 seconds) they get mild and delicious, with a subtle bitterness. It’s a good bitter though-nothing like dandelions or garlic mustard that aren’t fit to be in the same basket, let alone on the same plate. 

The shoots are sweet and delicious, much more mild than the greens. As they can grow to be over a foot long, they’re almost more of a vegetable than a leafy green, depending on when you harvest them. 

Bluebells love moist, rich soil, but you don’t have to go to the woods to get them. Many people know Virginia Bluebells as a garden plant, and they can make a great edible addition to your landscape.

#virginiabluebells #foraging #ephemerals #springwildflowers #wildfoodlove #mertensiavirginica
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Narrow-leaved Wild Leek / White Ramp (Allium burdickii) 

If you’re in a ramp patch you might occasionally see some with white stems (pic 1,2). These are a cousin to the more common variety with much larger leaves and red stems (pic 3,4,5)

Allium burdickii is not as common as the red-stemmed variety, and in every ramp patch I’ve been in, the white ramp is heavily outnumbered. 

Where I harvest, I like to leave them alone, and mark the areas where they grow with sticks or middens on the ground so I can go back in the fall and help them spread their seeds. I also try and remove garlic mustard when I see it-a much more imminent threat in my mind to ramps than foragers out to gather some leaves. 

2020 was a banner year for ramp seeds, and you can still help the plants right now (pic 7) as some seed heads are still full and would love for you to give them a shake as you walk by. 

#alliumburdickii #ramps #ephemerals #foraging #spring
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#4: Erythronium leaves 

Erythronium (Trout Lily) are another ephemeral that I see widespread in my ramp patches, there’s at least 32 species world-wide, with at least one endangered species in MN (Dwarf Trout Lily). 

They’re a beautiful, delicious plant I eat every year, but I can’t recommend serving them to the general public. Plenty of people say these are edible, but also emetic if eaten in “quantity”. 

I can tell you, at least with E. albidum and E. americanum I’ve eaten, that some people are much more sensitive than others, so if you want to make a salad to serve people, make sure they’re comfortable eating it, and use a few leaves as a garnish. 

Funny enough, I didn’t learn about these from a foraging book. Like knotweed, I learned about them from one of my favorite chefs: Michel Bras, one of the most influential chefs of the turn of the 21 century. 

Any chef that works with wild plants owes a debt to Bras. His book, although a little dated now, still teaches me new things all the time. While flipping through the book I also caught a recipe using tansy flowers 😳 that I’d probably pass on. 

The whitefish crusted with sunflower seeds is a dish of mine from 2012, and an example of how I eat the leaves: a few at a time, as a garnish. 

#troutlily #erythronium #michelbras #ephemerals #foraging
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Its small at first, but grows to a worthy size for eating as it flowers. It’s related to cabbage and mustard greens (Brassicaceae) and eating just a few leaves will give you a potent, spicy pop of mustard-family flavor reminiscent of horseradish. 

Eaten in combination with other things, like in a salad, the flavor becomes submissive and you’ll barely know it’s there. 

Some people eat the spicy roots shaped like canine teeth, but for the work I hardly think they’re worth it. 

A great wild spring green for the salad bowl-eat them leaves, tender stem, flowers and all🤤. 

#cutleaftoothwort #cadamineconcatenata #ephemeral #springedibles #foraging #wildfoodlove
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Plant #2 is Virginia waterleaf, and, I’m cheating a bit as it’s semi-ephemeral. The plant comes up in spring and goes to flower, but gives a second harvest of fresh growth in the fall, where other ephemerals I know do not. 

This is a great starter wild green-easy to recognize with the splashes of white on the leaves that may or may not be present. After you learn it though, don’t be surprised if, like me, you eventually pass it up for more delicious greens nearby. 

The plant gets tough quick, and the flavor is..meh, so I usually have small amounts of very young greens in blends of blanched and sautéed mixes. 

My favorite part is the wee flower buds, that, if you get at the right time, can be harvested in decent quantity and are good steamed as they’ll soak up oil sautéed. 

#hydrophyllumvirginianum #waterleaf #foraging #fueledbynature #weedeater
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