It dawned on me that it’s been a hot while since I’ve last cooked something, let alone something on the regular, ever since moving this past summer.

However, my name came up on the DT breakfast rotation and I found a container full of leftover tomato slices from MBS breakfast last week. So I decided to make the tomato tart with spices and herby cream cheese, adapted from Claire Saffitz’s Dessert Person for breakfast. Some of Claire’s recipes were misses for me while others were hits. This is a definitive hit.

If you’re like me and you also like tomatoes, cream cheese, herbs, and pastry crust, this is a recipe for you.

If you want to convince yourself that tomatoes taste good and are a superior fruit, this is a recipe for you. Seriously, this tart is an ode to tomatoes and showcases the fruit to at its best.

I’ve made a version of this tart before, using feta cheese, but decided to go for the mild palette and substitute it with cream cheese instead.

It was also cheaper.

I particularly like this recipe because it is low effort, high flavor reward.

This tart is the unexpected love child of a bagel and a pizza. It has the body of a pizza/flatbread but the spirit of a bagel, perfect mix of its parents and the strangest and best of both worlds.

Making This Tart

You could make your own pie dough for this. If I had more time, that would always be what I would opt for (homemade pie crust >>>> storebought) but alas, I was short on time. The next best alternative was to use puff pastry.

I took out one sheet of puff pastry and let it thaw for about 1.5 hours on the counter to room temperature to soften. In the mean time, I thinly sliced some shallots and mixed it in with some tomatoes and 8 cloves of unpeeled garlic cloves on a baking sheet before. I then sprinkled that with salt, black pepper, fresh thyme, coriander powder (aw, i love me some coriander, let’s gooo), red pepper flakes, cumin seeds, and fennel seeds and mixed this into the rest of the vegetables before letting it roast for about 35 minutes.

One might wonder, “why are there so many dang spices? do you need that many spices?” And I would say, “yeah, you need all of that, you imbecile.”

Though I guess you can make a strong case for substituting a good chunk of these spices with Italian seasoning.

No, but seriously, using this mixture of spices made my house smell amaaaazing while the vegetables were roasting. Roasted vegetables never smelled so dang good. Honestly, if I just took those roasted veggies and mix it in with some plain spaghetti, it would have been a solid meal.

Anyway, while I was busy aggressively inhaling the spice fumes in my house, I took one thawed pastry sheet and rolled it out to smooth out the fold creases, trying to roll it to about 9.5″ to 14″ or a size that would fill the space on a baking sheet well. I then pricked it all over with a fork and followed the packaging instructions, baking it for 15 min at 400F.

Next step was to make the herbed cream cheese. Because I wasn’t working with feta cheese, I took account that the whipped cream cheese would probably contribute more to the liquid state of the end product so I added less mayo in anticipation of that. I eyeballed this but these are my rough measurements: 8 oz/1 cup of cream cheese to 2 general tbsp of mayo.

I pulled out my food processor and dumped the cream cheese, mayo, 2 tbsp chopped oregano, and a tsp worth of thyme leaves into it. I then took the roasted unpeeled garlic cloves and unpeeled that into the same processor. Curiously enough, when I roasted these cloves, the garlic inside became jammy and I just had to squeeze out the garlic like little mini toothpaste packets. I blended it until smooth then seasoned with a bit of black pepper. I did not have to add any more salt to this.

This would legit make a great bagel spread, by the way.

I then called it a good stopping point for the night and assembled the tart right before DT breakfast the next day.

I made short work of assembling the tart. I first used a butter knife to coat the surface of the puff pastry tart with the herby cream cheese. Then, I layered on the tomatoes and shallots before sprinkling some oregano leaves as a pop of green color.

Overall

Going to repeat here but I really like this tart. Like I said before, it’s a simple tart with a simple process but high reward. This tart ended up being a hit at DT breakfast. Everyone ate seconds and some thirds. I ended up being very happy with it. I was able to use leftovers to make this. This tart showcases roasted tomatoes at its best and involves one of the best utilizations of herbs and spices that I’ve seen in a recipe. I might actually end up substituting the feta cheese with cream cheese in the future. The mild taste of the cream cheese still paired with the flavors very well. I would be very curious to see how using a variety of tomatoes would affect the flavor profile of this. I liked this cream cheese pizza-ish dish.

The flavors make my mouth happy and my breath smell terrible but overall, no regrets. Because of the cream cheese, I was also made aware of my growing lactose intolerance, which wasn’t as cool, but still no regrets.

Go make this tart.