A sweet gift from Italy!
ingredients for 4 generous servings (total cost about 4€ for with organic ingredients)
a portion of basic frolla dough for Italian style stuffed pastries made with
- 250 g pastry flour
- 100 g butter
- 65 g superfine sugar
- zest from 1 lemon
- 1 egg
- 4 g baking powder
- 1 g baking ammonia
- 1 g salt
- 15 ml milk
for the filling
- 200 g jam (strawberry, plum, kumquat, apricot, or whatever you prefer)
- zest from 1/2 lemon
As we have already explained in our article dedicated to the Corfiot cuisine, Corfu has been under the Venetian domination for several years. This period – fortunately for the Corfiots – left a strong mark on the island, greatly shaping its current culture. One can notice that in the local architecture, the language, the food. The Corfiot dialect is full of Italian words and expressions, mostly Venetian. Many many words have been incorporated in Corfiot colloquial language.
Especially the words that give name to food and sweets – also influenced or even inherited by the Italians – are more or less Italian.
One of the them is the pasta frolla, which is none other than the well known Italian crostata. I remind you that the crostata is a tart, made with a sweet short crust dough, which the Italians call “pasta frolla”, filled with jam and covered with dough stripes, placed crosswise (hence the name “crostata”) to form a lozenge pattern.
In Corfu they named this pastry after the name of its dough base, while in the rest of Greece the name “frolla” became “flora”, which sounds more Hellenic and the sweet was renamed as “pasta flora”.
In Corfu the pasta frolla is filled mostly with strawberry jam, kumquat marmalade or plum jam, to take profit of their magnificent fragrant wild strawberries, their kumquat fruits and their plums, which in Corfu are called burneles (from the Italian prugna). Nonetheless, one can make it, using whatever jam he prefers. In this case I used a wild strawberry jam, I made with the strawberries I bought from the island.
One last detail. If you ever have the chance to find Corfiot butter, you should definitely try to make the frolla dough with it. Corfiot butter is fantastic, it has an incredible taste, that is delivered to the pastry, making it just unique!
So, first of all we prepare one portion of our basic frolla dough for Italian style stuffed pastries (look how to prepare it here) and we let it chill in the fridge for several hours, ideally overnight.
Then we proceed to the assembling of the crostata. It is very important to chill the preparation after every stage, if we want a well shaped crostata in the end. So we are going to return it to the fridge several times.
We remove the dough from the fridge about 15- 20 minutes before starting to make the crostata and we let it soften a little, then we cut it in two parts.
We roll out one of the parts in a disc of 5 mm thickness, we line a 20 cm tart ring, previously well buttered and we briefly return it to the fridge for about 15-20 min. We then roll out the second part in a sheet a little thinner (about 3 mm) and we also place it in the fridge (we will use it later to make the stripes).
We grate the zest of half lemon over the jam, we stir with a spoon and we spread it all over the base of our crostata, leaving a 1cm margin, so that during baking the boiling jam will not overflow and “escape” from the borders of the tart. We briefly return the crostata to the fridge for once again to chill, while we prepare the stripes.
We remove the rolled sheet from the fridge and we cut stripes of 1 – 1,5 mm width with a round or a wave cutter. We lay them on a baking tray covered with parchment and we place them in the fridge for about 15 minutes, to let them harden, so that we can easily manipulate them, without risking that they will melt and break in our hands.
Then we place two pairs of 5 stripes crosswise on top of the crostata arranging them in regular distance, starting from the middle and moving towards both edges of the crostata, aiming to form a symmetrical lozenges pattern. We cut off the excess of the stripes all over the crostata, by softly pressing them with our finger on the edges of the form. This way they perfectly “stick” over the edges of the base. You can keep the leftover dough in the freezer inside a suitable bag for about a month.
We place the prepared crostata in the fridge for one last time (about 10 min) to help it keep its shape, during baking.
We bake the crostata on the lower part of a preheated static oven at 170 Celsius degrees (or 150 C for ventilated function) for about 25 min, or until the jam has settled and the surface of the dough has turned to light golden, but not brown. The tart should not be overbaked, we aim to get a soft biscuit crostata that will melt to the mouth.
When ready, we remove the tart from the oven, we place it on a wire rack and we let it cool completely, before removing it from the tart tin.
We can store the tart at room temperature for about 4 days. The following day it will be even better! If it’s too hot we can keep it in the fridge in the upper part (the least cold one) it will be a pleasant fresh dessert!
NOTE: To learn more about tart shells, read our detailed guide on how to perfectly line and form a tart shell here
