Pistachio Milk Chocolate Tart

It was a Monday dinner and movie night with my friends who are fans of chocolate and pistachio.  Time to try Martha Stewart's Milk Chocolate and Pistachio tart!

Here is a link to the recipe: Milk Chocolate-Pistachio Tart Recipe

First change, the recipe says to spray the tart pan with cooking spray. I've never had a problem with a tart not releasing from my Gobel tart pan with removable bottom, but just in case I did lightly cover the bottom and sides of the pan with butter. 

Second change, instead of using all milk chocolate, I used half bittersweet and half milk chocolate, for a deeper flavor. The bittersweet chocolate is Ghirardelli 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate, and the milk chocolate is Ghirardelli Milk Chocolate Chips. 

Third change, when making the crust, I processed the pistachios into a powder with small grains instead of using chopped pistachios. I felt this would make for a smoother bite and an easier-to-work-with dough. I think I was right!

Some of the recipe reviews mention having a problem rolling out the tart dough after refrigerating it. In anticipation of this, I pressed it into as wide and flat a disc as I could, probably about 7" diameter, so there would be less to roll out.  I refrigerated it for 20 minutes instead of the 15 it calls for, and it probably would have benefited from another 10 or so minutes in the fridge. Even longer, perhaps, maybe an hour, you'd have to experiment.

While rolling it out I made sure to flour the counter and rolling pin repeatedly, and slide a spatula under the dough after each pass from the rolling pin to make sure it didn't stick to the counter.  With this, I was soon able to roll it out to the 11" diameter that the recipe calls for. It was a bit tricky to transfer it to the tart pan without the disc breaking up, but I managed with the help of two spatulas, and this dough is super easy to patch up anyway, like working with a pate sucrée.  I patched up thin spots and irregularities and left it to firm up in the refrigerator overnight.

I baked the filling at 325 for about 30 minutes, just like the recipe says. Prior to baking, I placed the crust in the freezer for a half hour to make sure it wouldn't shrink too much when it encountered the heat of the oven.

Making the pistachio paste and spreading it into the cooled filling was the trickiest part of the process. I started out using the small food processor and ended up transferring the paste to our mid-size processor to try to make sure everything got covered with the oil. I added extra oil - I used 2.5 teaspoons of avocado oil instead of the 1 teaspoon the recipe calls for. I got the idea from other bakers who reviewed the recipe, but even with this, the "paste" was super crumbly and never became smooth, even though I processed the hell out of it. I ended up dumping chunks of it into the crust, and smoothing it out with the side and flat bottom of a small silicone spatula. This process took quite a while but eventually I got the whole bottom of the crust covered.

The tart took 33 minutes to bake. At that point I could see through the oven window that the sides were puffed up (and bubbling at the edges - this I"d never seen before), and it had reached an internal temperature over 170 degrees ), so I took it out of the oven. Thankfully it didn't crack.

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