Goat Cheese and Fig Puff Pastry Tarts
Savory, creamy, and sweet, these Goat Cheese, Sweet Onion and Fig Puff Pastry Tarts are the most delicious small-bite appetizer to serve at a party or holiday!
- Prep Time: 00:30
- Cook Time: 01:28
- Total Time: 1 hour 58 minutes
- Yield: 20 pieces
- Category: Appetizer
- Method: Bake
- Cuisine: American
Ingredients
- ½ batch rough puff pastry or classic puff pastry (or store-bought, see notes)
- All-purpose flour (for work surface)
- Egg wash (1 egg whisked with 1 teaspoon of water or cream)
- 1 cup fig jam
- ½ cup prepared caramelized onions, rough chopped
- 4 ounces goat cheese
- 6-10 sprigs of fresh thyme
Instructions
- Prepare rough puff pastry or defrost frozen puff pastry. If you make it, you will only need half a batch. The remaining half can be frozen. Or, you can double the filling for this recipe and make about 32 bite-sized tarts.
- Preheat the oven to 400ºF and place an oven rack in the middle part of the oven. Line a baking sheet with a piece of parchment paper.
- Roll out the puff pastry on a floured surface (remember, you are only using half of the batch if you've made this rough puff recipe) to about ⅛-inch thickness, or about a 10-by 14-inch rectangle. Or, if you are using store-bought puff pastry, simply remove it from the package according to the instructions and lay it out on a lightly-floured surface so the puff doesn’t stick to the counter.
- Using a 2-3/4-inch circle cutter (or similar), stamp out the pastry. You should be able to stamp out at least 16 circles. I don't recommend re-rolling the scraps for this purpose, so place your stamps as closely together as possible and save the scraps for something else.
- Now dock the pastry: Using a 2-inch cutter (or similar), make an indentation in the center of each circle of pastry, but make sure not to press all the way through. Then, take a fork and dock the middle of the pastry to prevent the dough from rising too much during baking.
- Place the pastry on the prepared baking sheet spaced evenly apart. Brush each pastry with a thin layer of egg wash. Place a heaping teaspoon of the caramelized onions in the center circle.
- Set aside in the freezer or refrigerator while you prepare the remaining ingredients.
- Using a bench scraper, a knife, or kitchen shears, cut up the goat cheese into ½-inch pieces. Either leave as-is, or for neater looking pastry, roll each piece of goat cheese into a ball. Set aside in the refrigerator until ready to use.
- Place the fig jam in a pastry bag or a ziploc bag.
- Remove the puff pastry rounds from the freezer and bake them for 12 minutes, or until the pastry is puffed, but not yet golden.
- Working quickly, using the edge of the piping bag (or a small round cookie cutter) push down any pastry that has puffed in the middle. Then pipe about 2 teaspoons of fig jam into the center of each puff. Then, place a piece of goat cheese in the middle.
- Return to the oven and bake for an additional 5-8 minutes, or until the pastry is golden and the goat cheese is puffed up.
- Remove the tarts from the oven and let them cool slightly on the baking sheet before transferring to a cooling rack.
- Pick the thyme and sprinkle the leaves over the tarts. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Notes
As a baking site, I will always say homemade puff pastry is better than store-bought. But it's also ok to use store-bought too! Different brands come in various quantities, so you may have more or fewer tarts depending on your brand and your size cutter. But the spirit of the recipe is the same no matter what.
If you don't want to make the caramelized onions, this ingredient can be skipped.
The size of the puff pastry bites can vary, depending on the quantities you wish to bake up. If you want more, use a smaller cutter. During testing, I made as few as 12, and as many as 24 in a single recipe by using a smaller cutter. The baking time will vary slightly, though not by a lot.
These bites are best eaten on the day they are made. Leftovers can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge or freezer and reheated in a toaster oven.
The total time to make this recipe depends on whether or not you make your own puff pastry, so keep that in mind.
Putting the jam in the piping bag isn't strictly necessary, but it makes quick work of adding the jam to the center of the pastry. This is useful since it should be done as quickly as possible to minimize the time the partially baked pastry spends out of the oven. If you don't have a piping bag, use a Ziploc bag with a square corner, then snip off the corner, and, voila, a make-shift piping bag.
Find it online: https://everydaypie.com/goat-cheese-and-fig-puff-pastry-tarts/