Brioche Plum Tart

Denise of Chez Us picked this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe. She selected the Brioche Plum Tart. Please visit Denise’s blog for the complete recipe. This is a bit of a different tart, instead of using tart dough you make brioche dough to use as the base. I substituted pluots (a hybrid of a plum and an apricot) since that was what I could find at the store. My pluots were much larger than what Dorie used, as I only used 3 pluots. Dorie used many, many more plums in the original recipe. Also, since I was using a plum/apricot hybrid, I used apricot preserves instead of plum jam.

The recipe says that you can make good brioche dough as long as you have a good mixer and some patience. Since it is summer, I have a little more time to spend baking. That’s a good thing since this tart took over 5 hours from start to finish. It’s been a while since I’ve made anything with yeast, and I forgot how time consuming baking with yeast can be. This seemed to take especially long, as you do a very lengthy second rise, which takes about 2 hours. After the initial rise, Dorie has you place the dough in the refrigerator and chill for 30 minutes, then you deflate the dough, and repeat. For a total of 2 hours or until the dough stops rising.

Once you finally get through this step, you shape the dough into a tart pan and refrigerate another 30 minutes. Finally you spread the dough with the jam/preserves and arrange the fruit on top. This bakes for just 30 minutes, which seems really fast after you’ve spent all of that time waiting for the dough to rise. The recipe has you place the tart pan on a baking sheet while baking, which is a very necessary step! The preserves complete bubbled over and it would have been one big mess in my oven had I not had the baking sheet to catch the drips.

I really liked the combination of the plums and the apricot jam in this tart. It is sweet because of the preserves, but not overly so. The brioche had a great texture and the flavor was good. I don’t think that I had made brioche before and it was very good. This method takes a long time, but in reality it isn’t that labor-intensive. The kneading is done in the mixer, so really all you have to do is pat down the dough every so often. I know that yeast breads don’t normally keep very well, but I really hope that it will keep long enough for me to have some of the leftovers for breakfast the next few days.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, pages 54-55.