Blueberry Yogurt Tartlets

Oddly enough, it started with chicken pot pie.

Still following the rules of a strict diet, I tried to devise a recipe for chicken pot pie without cream, butter, shortening, puff pastry, or any wheat-based flours. The filling was fairly intuitive to figure out. But the flaky, golden pie crust was going to be a bit of a challenge.

Pie crust is basically flour, salt and/or sugar, butter / shortening / lard (i.e. fat), and ice cold water. While I'm not an expert baker, I have made enough pies in my lifetime to have attained a modest mastery of the pie crust. And if there's anything I know about pie crusts is that you don't muck around with the fundamentals. Baking is a science -- getting the chemistry wrong makes the difference between light pastry and rock-hard dough.

As I've said before, non-wheat flours are relatively new to me. I've come to like oat flour in particular because of its nutty taste and grainy, crumbly texture like in shortbread. I decided that a sablée ("sandy") crust would be a palatable alternative to the flaky crust.

However, I wasn't sure if substituting light olive oil for butter would work. So I needed to test it out first in a simpler recipe.

I had seen the Yogurt Tartlets recipe posted on 101 Cookbooks and appreciated the fact that the custard was made of (light) yogurt and eggs -- ingredients that are allowed in the diet -- and yet somehow still turns out creamy even in the absence of heavy cream. Heidi's recipe uses maple syrup as a sweetening agent, but I replaced that with mild honey. I couldn't use her crust recipe because it is full of banned ingredients, so what better occasion to test out the oat flour crust I had in mind?

[Note to AP: This is an Option #2 recipe.]

Oat Flour Pie Crust
Makes 1 large pie crust or 7-8 tartlet crusts

1¼ cups oat flour
¼ tsp sea salt
2 Tbsp light olive oil
4-8 Tbsp chilled water

1. In a large bowl, combine the oat flour and salt.
2. Add the olive oil and stir it in a little.
3. Add one tablespoon of chilled water at a time until all of the dry mixture is clumpy and moistened. The dough should be able to hold its shape when pressed into the shape of a ball. If it feels very sticky or runny then you have added too much water; compensate by adding a small amount of oat flour. If it is too crumbly to form a ball, then add a bit more water.
   
4. Cover the dough with plastic wrap and chill it in the freezer for about 10-15 min. Chilled dough is always easier to roll out.
5. With a rolling pin, roll out the dough on a flat surface until approximately twice the thickness of your pie tin, say the thickness of a dish rag. There's no need to flour the surface, as with conventional pie dough, but you will find that the dough is very crumbly and uneven. Don't worry about tears or holes because you can easily patch them by pressing down or smoothing some dough over the gaps.
6. With a wide knife or a scraper, lift up what you can of the dough and lower it into your pie tin(s). Gently press down the dough into every corner of the tin and cut off the excess from the rim. Patch any holes. You can skip Step 5 and opt instead to press a wad of dough into the tin and smoothing it out by hand. However, this could yield a crust of uneven thickness, so beware.
   
7. Refrigerate the crusts until ready to fill.

Blueberry Yogurt Tartlets
Fills 5-6 tartlets (I know this is inconvenient, like getting a package of 10 hot dogs with a package of 8 hot dog buns. I will try to adjust the quantities in the next version of this recipe.)

2 eggs
1 cup plain Greek (or Balkan-style) yogurt
¼ cup honey
zest of 1 lemon
1 Tbsp ginger juice (grate a ginger root then squeeze/strain out the juice)
5-6 Oat Flour Pie Crusts (see above) in tartlet tins
1 pint of fresh blueberries (or go wild and try other types of fruit)

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
   
2. In a large bowl, lightly beat the eggs.
3. Add the yogurt, honey, lemon zest, and ginger juice. Whisk thoroughly until well combined.
4. Fill the pie crusts no more than ¾ to the top. The custard will rise a bit during baking.
5. Bake 20-30 min or until the crusts look dry and the custard doesn't jiggle too much.
6. Allow the tartlets to cool.
7. When ready to serve, top the tartlets with blueberries.