The Easy Carrot Tart I’m Making This Easter and Beyond

A party without a shareable appetizer is like Easter without a bunny. And while pre-made puff pastry snacks from the freezer aisle can often do the job (if a bit soggily, at times), a freshly prepared savory tart delivers so much more impact with very little extra effort. With just one sheet of store-bought puff pastry, creamy Brie cheese, a few roasted carrots, and a zippy honey-mustard drizzle, this tart comes together easily for a colorful and delicious dish. It’s a great year-round addition to any party spread, Easter brunch, or even a picnic lunch. 

While carrots are rarely a “main event” ingredient, our Birmingham-based test kitchen colleague Renu Dhar has found a way to showcase them in this savory carrot tart recipe. The key to a crisp crust with a tender carrot topping comes down to just a few critical techniques.

Why Store-Bought Puff Pastry Is Best

Puff pastry is a laminated dough, made by repeatedly folding butter and dough together until the layers are paper thin. When the heat of the oven hits the dough, steam expands from the melting butter. Once baked, you have a light and delicately flaky pastry that is the perfect vessel for holding both sweet and savory fillings. It’s a beautiful thing.

But making it from scratch not only takes time, it’s also a pain to do. The temperature of the butter and the dough, as well as the ambient conditions of the room you’re in, all need to be just right for the pastry to turn out perfectly. The easiest solution? Don’t make it. 

Instead, start with frozen puff pastry. This allows you to throw it together relatively fast. When properly baked until deep golden and crisp, frozen puff pastry is a powerhouse ingredient, offering a quick foundation for the roasted carrots. We love the buttery flavor of Dufour, but other brands, such as readily available Pepperidge Farm, also work well. 

Whatever brand you choose, well-baked is the key here. Undercooked puff pastry is gummy and bland, and it’s an unfortunately common occurrence. To avoid this, the thawed puff pastry needs to be baked until bien cuit, the French term for “well done” which refers to the deep, dark color on the crust. To achieve this, it requires longer than you’d expect to bake through, drive off moisture, and fully express all its flaky layers.

While many recipes call for par-baking the puff pastry before assembling the tart to ensure proper baking, Renu found that with this tart, this step could be skipped because of the carrots’ relatively low water content—they dump less moisture onto the pastry than many other vegetables and fruits used for tarts like this, and thus make it less soggy (that, plus some prep tips I’ll discuss below).

Instead she scores and docks the dough right before adding the toppings. Scoring the dough’s perimeter with a pairing knife and poking the dough all over with a fork (aka docking) ensures the crust’s edges will puff properly, while the center stays smooth and flat when baking. This saves time and effort, while still achieving a shatteringly crisp crust from edge to edge. 

How to Make a Flavorful Carrot Topping That Won’t Cause a Soggy Crust

The key to ensuring the tart’s crust remains crisp relies not only on how the dough is prepared, but also on how the carrots are prepared, and how all the ingredients are layered together. 

First, roast the carrots separately, before assembling the tart. If you were to plop raw carrots onto the raw tart dough and bake it, you’d end up with a tart with browned edges, a soggy bottom and still crunchy carrots. There’s no avoiding this step—those carrots need some alone time in the oven first to ensure that once the tart is assembled and baked, they are fully tender at the same time the cheese melts and the dough cooks through.

While carrots are not a very juicy vegetable, roasting them first still helps to cook off any excess moisture, which could cause the puff pastry to turn wet and prevent it from rising properly. Before roasting, the carrots are tossed with oil, garlic powder, and ground ginger that complements their natural sweet flavor. For visual contrast and a fun presentation, we like to cut some of the carrots into round coins, and some into long strands.

The second tip to ensure a crisp tart is to layer the ingredients with purpose. Start by shingling the Brie cheese across the prepared pastry. Not only does the Brie add creamy, rich flavor to the tart, the cheese also acts as a protective layer to help prevent excess moisture from seeping down into the dough. The cheese is then brushed with a honey-mustard vinaigrette, followed by the carrots. As the cheese bakes and melts, it also anchors the carrots in place to ensure everything comes together into one cohesive bite: The bottom crust is crispy, the carrots on top are soft, and all of it is glued together with delicious melted cheese.

Note that when you’re baking the tart, it can be difficult to tell if the underside is crisp just by looking at the top, so we recommend gently lifting the edge of the tart with a spatula and running a butter knife across the bottom to feel for how crisp it is. If still soft, loosely cover the top with aluminum foil and let it bake for a few more minutes until the bottom is crisp.

Once you remove the tart from the oven, let it cool (uncovered—you don’t want to trap steam!) for a few minutes before cutting to allow the cheese to firm up slightly. The tart can be served warm, or cooled to room temperature.

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