Prepare an open-faced puff pastry tart with pear, gorgonzola, and honey. This quick tart is the perfect appetizer with wine and a cheese platter. It features a combination of crunchy nuts, juicy pear, and soft blue cheese. It has everything for a perfect balance of flavors: sweetness, a hint of acidity, salty notes, and a subtly spicy aftertaste.
Gorgonzola or blue cheese?
You can replace gorgonzola with any other type of blue cheese. For example, you might use Roquefort, Stilton, Danablu, or Cambazola. You can also use a soft cheese with white mold, like Camembert or Brie, to achieve a traditional French flavor profile. However, this will create a completely different pear tart, as white mold cheeses are creamier and milder, whereas blue cheeses are sharper, have a pronounced salty flavor, and have a distinctive aroma.
How to Form the Edges of the Tart
I leave about ½ inch (1 cm) from the tart's edge before laying out the filling. If the dough is rolled not too thinly and allowed to rest, it puffs up into beautiful airy edges during baking. If desired, you can pay extra attention to the edges and decorate them in one of three ways:
- Lightly brush the edges of the future tart with water and place a strip of dough about ½ inch (1 cm) wide on each edge.
- Retract ½ inch (1 cm) from the edge and make a knife incision around the perimeter of the future tart. This creates a visible boundary for our filling, and the edges, not weighed down with filling and its juice, will puff up freely. Important: Do not cut through the dough entirely; a half-cut is sufficient.
- Apply a pattern to the edges of the future tart using a knife or fork.
Why I Love This Recipe
I adore this recipe for its simplicity, the lack of messy cleanup, and the minimal ingredients required. You only need a large pear, ready-made puff pastry, and a piece of flavorful gorgonzola or another blue cheese. You get an unusual, aromatic, and delicious appetizer tart with minimum effort and minimum preparation time. Another interesting variant is baked pear with cheese in the oven.
Ingredients for 6 portions
- 9 oz Puff Pastry (250 g)
- 1 whole Pear large
- ⅓ cup Gorgonzola Cheese crumbled (50 g)
- 3 tbsp Pistachios chopped (20 g)
- 1 tsp Honey
How to cook
Take about 9 oz (250 g) of chilled (not frozen) puff pastry, slightly roll it out, and place it on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
Let the dough rest at room temperature for 20 minutes, then slightly warm up and relax. You can use either yeast-based or non-yeast puff pastry for this recipe.
Wash one large or two small pears, remove the core, and slice them thinly. Depending on the size of the pear, you may need one or two pieces. If desired, you can peel the pear if its skin is too harsh.
Large, firm, non-sweet winter varieties of pears are ideal for this tart. Overly sweet, juicy, and soft pears often turn into mush in this tart, giving it an overly sweet and rich fruity taste.
Lay the pear slices in a slightly overlapping layer over the pastry. Leave about ½ inch (about 1 cm) from the edges to form the borders.
Place the crumbled 2 oz Gorgonzola cheese (50-60 g) or any other blue cheese randomly on the pear slices. You can vary the amount of cheese according to your taste.
Blue cheese adds a spicy and salty note to the finished tart, contrasting with the sweet and juicy pear.
Next, sprinkle the open tart with the 3 tbsp (about 20 g) chopped pistachios or any other nuts you choose: walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, cashews, or pine nuts.
If you don't like nuts or are allergic to them, you can safely exclude them from this recipe.
Additionally, you can add a pinch of aromatic herbs, such as rosemary, tarragon, or thyme, to this tart.
The final touch: drizzle the tart with 1 tsp honey or, if you don't have honey, sprinkle with 1 tsp sugar, ideally cane sugar. If you are using a very sweet pear, you can skip this step.
Note that honey loses its beneficial properties and turns into a regular sweetener at temperatures above 104°F (40°C). To preserve all the vitamins, drizzle the tart with honey after baking.
Preheat your oven to 350°F (175-180°C). Bake the puff pastry tart for 15-20 minutes until the pastry is puffed and golden brown. Depending on the characteristics of your oven, the baking time and temperature may vary.
Some cooks recommend brushing the edges of the tart with beaten egg yolk, but in my opinion, the edges get a nice golden color even without the yolk. If I see that the dough has dried out while waiting, I brush it with plain water. You can slightly sweeten the water with sugar for a golden, appetizing crust.
The pear and gorgonzola puff pastry tart is ready. It can be served either hot or cold.
With its classic combination of pear and blue cheese, this bake is more of an appetizer than a dessert. It pairs perfectly with white wine and a cheese platter. It can be an addition to an aperitif and looks great on a buffet table.
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