Mushroom Tartlets - Filling the Tart Shells and Plating the Dish

Bryan Davis: Hi, this is Chef Bryan with Chef Bryan's Kitchen and we are working on Mushroom Tartlets. What we are going to do now, I have taken the mushrooms out of the skillet, I have got them sitting in this little container here. While thy are still hot, what we are going to do is we are going to add a little bit of cheese to it. You can do it in the pan, it is completely up to you. If you do it in the pan, be very careful have your bowl ready to go, so the cheese doesnt burn. What I like to do is take it out, put it in a container, I am just going to kind of put it in a separate bowl, sprinkle it with a little bit of Parmesan cheese. What this is going to do is this is going to allow the residual heat from the mushrooms to melt the cheese. So it is not going to fully melt, it is going to soften and it is going to break down a little bit but it is not going to fully, completely melt. It just kind of helps with the texture of the tart. So I am letting the residual heat melt the Parmesan cheese and now I am ready to fill my tart shells, I am using some pre-baked tart shells today but there are some different options you can do with these. These are pre baked, got them at the grocery store, but you can take your favorite pie dough, favorite tart dough and bake these in mini muffin tins.

You just roll your pie or tart dough out, take a cookie cutter, cut a round dough, put it into a little mini muffin pan, take your fingers and push it down and let the dough come up around the sides. Pop it in the oven and follow the cooking directions on the package that you use, or the recipe which you are using for the dough. You can also make the tart shells out of Fillo dough. Same process, if you have worked with Fillo dough before, you brush butter on three different layers of Fillo dough, put them together and then the same process. Cookie cutter, put them in, push them down, let the dough come up around the sides and then bake them for about for 15 minutes. When they come out, you have your little tart shells, they look like this. So what we are going to do is we are going to take our filling and we are just going to start filling the tart shells. You dont want them to be over filled to where mushrooms falling out the edges. Basically what you want to do is just get a nice, full tart shell.

So basically what I am going to do is just go ahead and finish filling these tart shells and as you can see I have gone ahead and filled the tart shells with the filling that we made and I am going to put them in the oven. Our filling is hot in this case, so we dont really need to put them in the oven that long but if you are making these ahead of time what you would want to do is put the shells in to heat them up for 3, 4 maybe 5 minutes at 350 degrees. So now since we are doing a small dinner party, I have got a small plate here that we are going to put our tarts on and what we are going to do is we are just going to garnish it with a little bit of greenery, little bit of basil, maybe a little bit of parsley and maybe a lemon crown. So we are going to take our knife and make a little lemon crown, it kind of adds to the look of our plate and we are just going to go around with a large knife, in the middle of the tomato, at about 45 degree angles until we make a nice little lemon crown. We set that right in the middle. Take a little bit of chopped parsley, sprinkle over the top of it and then we will be all set for our platter for our tarts and like I said the tarts dont need to be in very long, dont want them to be hot, you just want them to be warm. Especially if you made it ahead of time, you want to make sure that you definitely take the chill off, you dont want to serve these completely cold, room temperature is okay but cold is not. So we are going to take a little bit of parsley, I am going to sprinkle that on, a lemon, we are going to take our tarts out of the oven and then we are just going to arrange them on the platter. You can arrange them however you want, you can do these on a large platter but again I would not suggest -- like I said you want these to be kind of warm so you want to do them in small amounts on your platters. What you can do is once you get them heated, you can take this sheet pan, drop your oven down to a 175-200 degrees and just let them set in the oven through out the party and then what you can do is, as they need replaced, you just take your plate to the kitchen, open the oven, take a couple out, refill the plate and take the plate back out. But just make sure that you keep the oven at 175-200 degrees and they will stay warm in the oven without cooking. So there you go the Red Wine Mushroom Tartlets and for a final finish we are going to sprinkle the mushroom tartlets with a little bit of Parmesan cheese.