Recipes

Heston Blumenthal's Lemon Tart

The version to make when the tart is the point of the evening rather than the thing after dinner. Everything that usually goes wrong — a soggy base, a filling that scrambles or weeps — is headed off by a step you can measure, and the whole thing is built in stages you can stop between.

Total time
3 h estimated — the source gives no total time
Prep
30 min
Cook
1 h
Serves
12

Course Dessert

Cuisine French

Main ingredient Lemon Eggs

Techniques baking resting setting

Dietary looks vegetarian Inferred from the ingredients below, not a certification. Check them yourself if it matters.

Tags projectcrowd

Ingredients

Pastry

  • 300 g (2 cups) plain flour
  • 150 g unsalted butter
  • ½ tsp salt
  • 120 g icing sugar
  • 3 large egg yolks
  • ½ vanilla bean, seeds scraped
  • ½ lemon, zest finely grated
  • 1 egg, for the egg wash

Filling

  • 5 lemons, zest finely grated and juiced
  • 300 g (300 ml) double cream
  • 390 g caster sugar
  • 9 large eggs
  • 1 large egg yolk

Equipment

  • 26 cm loose-bottomed tart tin, 2.5 cm deep
  • Stand mixer with a paddle attachment
  • Hand blender, and a tall narrow container to use it in
  • Baking beans, for blind baking
  • Probe thermometer — the filling is taken to a temperature, not to a look

Instructions

  1. Beat the flour, butter and salt with the paddle on low speed for 2–3 minutes, until the mixture looks like damp sand.
  2. In a tall, narrow container, blitz the icing sugar with the egg yolks using a hand blender.
  3. Add the vanilla seeds and the lemon zest to the yolk mixture, then tip it into the mixer bowl. Keep mixing on low for 3–5 minutes, until everything is combined and it comes together as a soft dough.
  4. Press the dough into a flat rectangle, wrap it, and refrigerate for at least an hour.
  5. Roll the dough out between two sheets of baking paper to 2 mm thick, then freeze it for 30 minutes.
  6. Heat the oven to 190 °C (375 °F). Line the tart tin with the pastry, pressing it into the corners and leaving the excess hanging over the rim. Keep the offcuts.
  7. Scrunch a sheet of baking paper into a ball and open it out again several times, until it has no sharp folds left in it. Prick the base all over with a fork, lay the paper over it, and add enough baking beans to come a quarter of the way up the sides. Bake for about 20 minutes, until the pastry is cooked through.
  8. Meanwhile, blitz the reserved offcuts with the whole egg using the hand blender.
  9. Lift out the paper and the beans, brush the entire inside surface of the case with the dough-and-egg mixture, and return it to the oven for a further 10 minutes.
  10. Take the case out and let it cool completely.
  11. Heat the oven to 120 °C (250 °F), and put the cooled pastry case in to warm through.
  12. Put all the filling ingredients in a heatproof bowl and stir them together with a spatula. Set the bowl over a pan of simmering water and warm the mixture until it reaches 60 °C (140 °F). Strain it through a fine sieve into a jug, and lift the bubbles off the surface with a spoon.
  13. Pull the oven shelf out a little way, pour the filling into the warm pastry case right up to the rim, then slide the shelf carefully back in. Bake for about 25 minutes, until the filling reads 70 °C (158 °F). Cool completely at room temperature.
  14. Just before serving, run a sharp knife around the top edge of the tin to trim off the overhanging pastry.

Notes & tips

From the source.

  • Oven: the temperatures above are for a conventional oven. In a fan oven, drop them by 20 °C.
  • Cooling is on top of the stated times. The source gives 30 minutes of preparation and an hour of cooking, and says explicitly to allow more for the pastry case and the finished tart to cool completely.
  • Eggs are 55–60 g unless the recipe says otherwise.
  • The source's cup is 250 ml, not 240 — an Australian publication. Its own gram weight for the flour is the number used above, so the difference does not bite here, but do not read 2 cups as a US cup.

Source

Heston Blumenthal, SBS Food, 18 January 2016. The recipe is from his book Heston Blumenthal at Home, which is where SBS took it from. Instructions rewritten; the source's own gram weights are used unchanged, and the cream converted to weight (decision 48).