Welcoming in the Summer Solstice with Pierre’s Blueberry Tart

I am back with another Stardew Valley recipe and after my last recipe was made for celebrating the beginning of spring, it only seemed fitting to make another recipe for the Summer Solstice. No fancy intros this time but remember to get everything prepped before diving into my review on Pierre’s Blueberry Tart.

This recipe is found in the summer section of the Stardew Valley cookbook and I won’t go into too much detail about the design of the book, as I covered this in my Lemon Poppyseed Muffin Review (hint hint, go check it out), but I will mention that the summer section of the book, has a tomato in the corner to represent the section and as you could have guessed by my review’s name, you get this recipe in the game via Pierre, who sends you a letter with the recipe in it.

This recipe makes a 9 inch blueberry tart, that is meant to feed 8-10 people (depending on how many slices you cut it into). Like the Poppyseed Muffin recipe, the ingredients were easy to get a hold off, but the yellow cornmeal did take a little bit of searching for (eventually found it in the world food aisle of big Tesco). The recipe was easy to follow, but requires a lot of time commitment, due to the number of steps and how long it takes to do each step. For example, I needed to whisk the curd mixture in a bowl over a hot saucepan for 20 minutes, so I recommend sticking on some music or your favourite podcast when following this recipe.

I feel like some slight changes could have been made to the recipe as well to shorten how much you needed to do. The first step to making the blueberry curd, has you heating the blueberries in a pan and squishing them to release the juice. You then need to strain the blueberries to just get the juice out of them without the seeds and skin. I wonder if an alternative to this, could have been to use ordinary blueberry juice, but I don’t know how this would affect the curd mixture, since most blueberries juices have extra sugar and lower concentration of blueberry juice in, but it might be worth it, if you wanted to reduce a step.

Another shortcut could have been to use a precooked sweet pastry case; however, I couldn’t find any cornmeal crusts and I feel like it wouldn’t have the same texture with a pre-bought crust, but if you don’t have the time to make your own dough, it might be worth trying.

A mistake I have made previously when cooking the Poppyseed Muffins is forgetting the temperature and time stated in the recipe needed to be reduced as I use a fan oven. I made this mistake again, but I did notice, but only after I had blind baked the crust, so the edges of my crusts was a little bit more ‘rustic’ looking than what they should have been.

So, after all the faffing around and cooking in a hot kitchen, was it all worth it? And the answer is yes absolutely. The blueberry curd bit was sweet and creamy and went well with the crunch of the cornmeal crust. Craig found the tart to be sweet but doesn’t think he could have eaten an entire portion of it (I ended up cutting the tart into 8 pieces, so maybe 10 would have been better). Everyone who had a bit seemed to really enjoy the tart and maybe adding some whipped cream to it, might have been helped with the sweetness.

Overall, I highly recommend making this recipe, as even though it is time consuming and requires effort to make, it really is worth it as it tastes better than any store-bought tart I have ever bought. As always, just make sure you remember what type of oven you are using and adjust the time and temperature accordingly.