Plum and Feta Tart: or, Adventures in Unimaginable Pies

This recipe is so classy they photographed it on an artistic floor tile instead of a plate.

Food and Drink, autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

 

Plum and Feta Tart 6 sheets of phyllo* 3 tbsp (45 mL) melted butter 6 ripe red plums 1 cup (¼ L) plain Greek yogurt or sour cream 2 eggs ¼ cup (6 cL) flour ¼ cup (6 cL) sugar 1 c (¼ L) crumbled feta 3 tbsp (45 mL) honey or maple syrup Heat oven to 375°F (190°C). Grease a shallow 9x13 (23x33cm) pan. Lay a sheet of phyllo on the pan and brush with melted butter. Lay another sheet of phyllo on top, matching the corners as well as you can. Brush with more of the melted butter. Repeat with all the remaining phyllo sheets, but do not butter the last one.† To make the edges nice and neat, tightly fold the dough on one of the long sides into the pan. Then fold in the other long side, then the two short sides. Then tuck in the corners. Brush the tops of the edges with butter. Slice a plum in half along the indented side, then twist the plum apart. Remove the pit. Take each half and cut it in half again parallel to the first cut, so you have one oval with skin on the back and one ring-shaped shaped slice with skin on the edges. Repeat with all the remaining plums. Blenderize the yogurt, eggs, flour, sugar, and feta. Be sure to stop the blender and scrape the sides with a rubber spatula a few times. Pour into the crust. Brush each plum piece all over with maple syrup or honey and place cut-side down in the filling. When placing the plums in the pie, leave space between them. That way, you can cut around the fruit when serving instead of trying to cut through it. Bake 25-30 minutes (15-18 hectoseconds), or until the filling jiggles but is set. Serve in squares. It's best the day it's made. * Quick note from my half-Greek friend who gets very twitchy about this: It's pronounced feel-o, not file-o. I didn't know that either. † If you don't want to deal with phyllo, I used a plain unbaked pie crust and the tart came out fine. Well, the crust came out fine at least. You can also purchase premade mini phyllo shells, cut the plums small enough to fit, and make plum-feta tartlets. Note: As with all recipes that give both metric and nonmetric measurements, pick one measurement system and use it for all of the ingredients. The amounts differ slightly between metric and customary. So, either use all liters and grams, or use all cups and tablespoons. Don't measure some things in metric and some things in customary. Note 2: If you cut this recipe in half, it will make one 9" or 10" (23cm or 25cm) pie. To help the plums fit into the pan, cut them into wedges instead of horizontal slices as in the original recipe. Source: Food and Drink, autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

I like to flip through this magazine that I found on a chair at the Ottawa airport back in the days when international travel was still a thing. The glossy-paged peep into the finer foods across the northern border fascinates me. This brings us to the Plum-Feta Tart.

I couldn't even try to imagine the taste of a dessert pie with feta cheese. Therefore, the plum-feta tart dug itself into my mind. Every time I looked over the recipes, I kept coming back to this photo of a pie on a floor tile loaded with fruit and a non-dessert cheese. What would it be like? What would happen if I made it? Would I live the plum-feta tart down?

I decided that perhaps some plums and feta cheese wouldn't be the most extravagant thing ever put into the grocery cart, and eventually got the Plum-Feta Tart added to the week's list. This led to the first carton of feta cheese I've purchased in quite some time. Did you know they sell pre-crumbled feta cheese just like they sell already-shredded cheddar? I thought I would need to figure out how to crumble it for myself. For some reason I thought feta was dangerously expensive, but it costs about the same as the cheddar, parmesan, and mozzarella that sit on the same supermarket shelf. I'd forgotten that feta looks like packing foam.

Everyone to whom I described the plum-feta tart was like "You're putting what in a fruit pie?" No matter how many times I said that no one finds anything odd about a fruit and cheese course, the general reaction was... unconvinced. You'd think I was putting chopped raisins in the peanut butter cookies. But just like trying to explain that quiche is "a savory custard," some people can't understand a concept until they eat it. 

While we're making expressive use of the blender, let's look at the recipe. I love the note at the top about how this is super-healthy and protein-packed, and therefore we can eat as much as we want with impunity. Why should anyone in Canada worry about eating too much pie when parka season is here? After spending the whole summer worrying about how we look in a single layer of clothes, autumn is that magical time when we can hide our loosening figures under jackets and proudly say "Put extra whipped cream on that!" 

But in case one is already preparing for next year when we must again put our coats and toques away, the plum-feta tart is not as sugared as most desserts on the American side of the border. (Though perhaps Canadians don't need as much sweetness as Americans do. More Canadian dessert research is needed as soon as I can go back.) The plum-feta tart looks like it can join banana bread and blueberry muffins in the category of foods that are both a breakfast and a dessert.

The phyllo crust be a thematic match with the feta cheese since both are Greek. However, the recipe only uses six sheets of phyllo, and I do not want the rest of the box to sit in the freezer until it gets freezer-burnt and must be thrown out. We made a normal pie crust instead. Since they used phyllo in the recipe photo, I have to ask: How did they get that entire 9x13 pie out of the pan in one piece?

The recipe tells us to "pulse and whirl until smooth," but the feta did not liquefy. Instead, it turned into little hard granules suspended in light beige goo. When I sampled a spoonful of the freshly-blenderized filling, the feta tasted out of place and wrong. It added an uncalled-for soapy undertone to what otherwise tasted like a mild yogurt. I know feta is one of the featured ingredients in this recipe, but I began to think adding it was a bad idea.

Getting all the dairy and raw egg ready for the high-wattage blade-whizzing reminded me of those people who take up exercising and start putting questionable things into their blenders. We only lack a scoopful of that weird supplement powder that comes in 20-pound plastic jars.

Moving on to plums, I have never purchased or eaten plums before. I just never thought to buy one. Apparently no one else in the area buys plums either because the store didn't have any. Aren't plums supposed to be an autumn fruit? Well, as much as I was curious what plums taste like, the closest we could get was plumcots. Apparently plum-based hybrid fruit have superseded plums, because we had our choice of plumcots, pluots, and a few other plum-apricot crossbreeds. In what I am sure is a move to make this recipe easier, the recipe has us cutting the plums as shown below. Not only do we only need a quick minute to cut the plums as specified, the plum slices look so darn pretty.

Well that was quick.

You finish making a plum-feta tart a lot faster than the fancy title and high-dollar photography suggest. When you read the recipe instructions, you can tell that they actually wanted people to make this pie. The directions are so... feasible. We merely had to get everything into a blender, pour the liquefied results into a pie pan, and plop in the fruit. This is where things went awry.

Attempting to fit these aesthetic plum slices into the pie brings us to where I ruined it. I halved the recipe (the original amounts make a lot of plum-feta tart). However, I underestimated how much pie the half-recipe would produce. Therefore, I selected a pan that was too small for the pie we ended up with. We couldn't fit more than one plum our pie when we cut them as directed, and I didn't want to waste the others. By the time I realized my error, I had already made the pie crust, placed it into the small pan, and didn't feel like making another one. 

Instead, I hastily cut the plums into smaller pieces and jammed them in there as best they would fit. They kept slipping and sliding out of place. The pie ended up looking like I just took some fruit slices and smashed them in there. I blame myself and not the Ontario liquor board for the fruit-fitting difficulty. Had I used a correctly-sized pie pan, this would have been a marvelously easy recipe (aside from the phyllo business).

Just for a foretaste of pie to come, I tried dipping one of the plum wedges into the sticky surplus of blenderized cheese. The two went together surprisingly well. The creamy cheese mixture was a perfect contrast to the plum's acidity. However, the feta alternately hid and popped up with the subtle yet out-of-place flavor of fermented soap. My high hopes for a lovely new experience fell into the disappointed expectation that once again, people would try the pie, squint suspiciously at it, and ask "What's in this?"

On a chemistry note, I took the extra pie crust and made little crackers with salt on top to bake next to the pie. Keep in mind that I made the crust the day before. When I got out the little extra crackers, the salt had gone hygroscopic on them, forming these little water-blisters on top. (You couldn't tell the difference after they baked.)

Despite the pie tasting (to put it graciously) unpromising, I figured it was already assembled and the oven was already preheated, so I may as well bake it. As the plum-feta wreck cooked, I started to think we might not throw it away after all. The kitchen smelled so good. First, a marvelously cheesy fragrance drifted about. Then the oven sent out tantalizing wafts of toasted butteriness from the crust. It was enough to make someone forget that they just had supper. To my own surprise, I couldn't wait to cut out a big piece of this pie.

However, we soon discovered that you can't cut this pie. You know how with apple pies, the knife just goes right through the fruit? The plums are too hard for that to happen here. They just popped out of the pie and made it look worse than it already did. This is the best-looking slice I could manage. Again, I blame my too-small pan choice for this, not the recipe. You need a bigger pan so you can leave plenty of space between the plums for the knife to pass through.

As for the taste, the feta melted into the rest of the pie filling as it baked, eliminating the hard cheese pellets that had interspersed the pie when it was fresh out of the blender. The custard was a lot more mild-flavored than before baking. I almost thought I had put vanilla in it. The whole thing reminded me of the Sour Cream Apple Pie Deluxe that we saw a while ago.

Those of you trying this at home should know that the plums did not soften while baking. They remained juicy and tart, which contrasted very well with the filling. However, the big pieces of firm fruit make this a pie that requires a knife and fork. Also, as aforementioned, you can't cut through the fruit without making a plum-feta mess of it. To make serving and savoring this pie easier, I suggest cutting the plums into smaller pieces. You could also skip that tedious honey-brushing business and just toss the fruits and honey in a bowl for a few seconds before putting them into the pie.

Because few pies vanish in a single day, we should note that the feta flavor intensified after leaving the leftover pie in the refrigerator overnight. Since it had nicely melted and melded with the crust, it wasn't discordant like it was before. With that said, the pie might have passed for dessert right out of the oven, but the next day it was decidedly not. So if you want a strong feta taste in the pie, make it the night before. If you want a milder and mellower flavor, make the pie the day you serve it.

In closing, I liked this pie a lot. It's less of a dessert and more of a one-pan fruit and cheese platter. However, you definitely have to tell people what's in it when serving. Since it has a lot of cheese and very little sweetening aside from the fruit, you can easily feel less bad about eating leftovers the next morning. It's unusual, interesting, and something I would definitely make again.