Brown Butter Peach Tourte

Our love affair with peaches continues: for a dinner we hosted on Friday night, I flipped through a Dorie Greenspan book and found a tart that I could make during the week.

Brown Butter Peach Tourte

The sweet tart dough recipe uses a food processor, which makes quick work of combining the flour and icing sugar, cutting the butter, and incorporating the egg yolk into the final dough. I made, rolled and froze one circle for the base, then made, rolled and refrigerated the other, for the top. I had no trouble rolling each dough out to a diameter of around 12”, without excessive cracking or splitting.

Brown Butter Peach Tourte

On Friday morning, I took out the bottom crust and left it to thaw on the counter. When it was almost soft enough to press into my tart pan, it cracked in a few places, but was easily patched. I don’t have a 9” tart ring, but there was enough dough to fit into my 10.5” one. While it baked blind, I worked on the filling.

We can’t stop buying peaches, and our counters have a mix of not quite ripe, ready to eat, and overripe fruit. The latter was what I used for the filling. The recipe doesn’t call for a lot of ingredients to compete with the peaches: just brown butter, and a bit of flour and sugar. I omitted the vanilla. As my peaches were very sweet, I used the full ¼ cup of lemon juice.

Once the bottom was assembled, I draped the top crust over the filling, then cut a small vent hole in the centre. A generous sprinkle of sugar over the water-brushed dough was the last touch before this tourte went into the oven.

Brown Butter Peach Tourte

The final product looked really good: the deeply browned bottom crust retained the fluted shape of the tin, while the top crust follows the shape of the fruit within. Despite sitting all day at room temperature, the bottom retained its crispness, while the juicy peaches turned the top crust to a soft, buttery consistency. The brown butter flavour wasn’t that prominent, but I didn’t miss it. This dessert’s overall texture and flavours won me over, and it might be a new summer favourite for us.

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