I've always enjoyed a good lemon meringue pie, but I didn't come across the concept of the lemon tart or tarte au citron until relatively recently. You don't really see them much over here. Small, single-serving lemon tarts show up frequently enough, but not full-sized pies. I had some extra lemons left over after making a batch of chicken piccata, so giving this lemon tart a whirl seemed like a good way to use them up.

Tarte au Citron

Slightly adapted from Edmonds Cookery Book

Ingredients

• 300g sweet shortcrust pastry¹
• 4 large eggs
• 170g sugar
• 1 Tbsp. lemon zest (1.5-2 lemons)
• 1/3 c. lemon juice (~2 lemons)
• 1 c. heavy (35%) cream
• icing (powdered/confectioners') sugar, to garnish

Directions

1. Roll out pastry and press into a 23cm (9") shallow tart tin.
2. Set oven to 190°C (375°F) and place pastry-lined tin in fridge to chill while oven preheats.
3. Cover pastry with crumpled parchment/baking paper and fill with pie weights, dry beans, or sugar.
4. Bake at 190°C (375°F) for 15 minutes.
5. Remove paper and pie weights and bake for another 5 minutes.
6. Remove from oven and set aside to cool.
7. Place a baking sheet in the now empty oven.
8. Whisk the eggs with the sugar, lemon zest, and lemon juice until well-combined and homogeneous.
9. Whisk in cream.
10. Open the oven and pull the middle rack out slightly. Place baked pie shell (still in its tin) onto the hot baking sheet. Pour the lemon mixture into the pie shell. (It will be very full.)²
11. Bake at 190°C (375°F) for 5 minutes.
12. Reduce heat to 150°C (300°F) and bake for another 20-25 minutes.
13. Remove from oven when filling is set but still has a wobble to it.
14. Dust with icing sugar.
15. Serve warm or cold.

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¹ The recipe calls for sweet shortcrust. I had some ready-made pastry in the freezer so I just used that. I'm sure the sweet shortcrust would've been lovely, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out with the "regular" pastry. (We don't really do sweet shortcrust in Canada. Most of our pies are sweet, rather than savoury, but they all use "regular"/savoury shortcrust without any added sugar. ^Back
2 Placing the pie shell in the oven first and then filling it tends to be easier and less messy than filling the shell first and then attempting to transfer a very full shell to the oven. ^Back