Chef Masterclass: Belen Aloisi's treacle tart

Winnie the Pooh could not have put it better. It is a dish every Briton remembers from childhood: crisp pastry filled with a gooey mixture of breadcrumbs and golden syrup, sharpened a little with lemon, but still heroically sweet. It is a dish that often baffles foreigners, not least because the ‘treacle’ involved is actually golden syrup, spooned sluggishly from Tate & Lyle’s famous green and gold tin. The same company also sells molasses as ‘black treacle’, in a red and gold tin, to confuse matters still further.

Belen Aloisi, the pastry chef at Heston Blumenthal’s The Hind’s Head, in Bray, grew up in Argentina, a country the joys of treacle tart have yet to penetrate; nevertheless, she has grown to love it, and has been perfecting the recipe over the four and a half years she has been in Bray.

What makes her recipe distinct from others is the filling – wholemeal, not white, breadcrumbs, and beurre noisette as well as lemon – but the tricky part is the pastry. Short and sweet – a classic pâte sucrée – it is a fragile vehicle for a liquid filling that only turns solid when it cools.

The trick, she says, is to not overwork the pastry, which will make it elastic and liable to shrink and toughen when it’s cooked.

“You don’t need to use a mixer: I make it by hand at home, and it actually makes it easier not to overwork it. Cream the butter and sugar together until they’re pale and fluffy, then add the egg and the milk, and don’t worry if it looks a bit split, when you add the flour it’ll all come together. Then just work it long enough for the pastry to be smooth, flatten it slightly and put it in the fridge.”

Aloisi rolls the pastry between two sheets of parchment paper (as any surplus flour might burn in the oven). She advises reserving a little of the pastry to fill in any cracks once the shell has been baked. “Just roll out little worms and use them to fill the gaps: the filling ends up quite solid, but it’s hot and liquid when it’s in the oven, so you don’t want it leaking through the shell.”

She leaves the pastry overhanging the edges of the flan case, then trims the pastry after baking it blind – without pricking it with a fork – while the eggwash stops the filling from dampening the base.

The filling, thanks to both the beurre noisette and the wholemeal breadcrumbs, is darker, richer and nuttier in flavour than a traditional treacle tart. Aloisi puts the pastry shell in the oven before pouring in the filling, which prevents any last-minute spills, and – once cooled – serves it with a milk ice cream sharpened with yogurt and soured cream (in true Heston fashion, it contains both invert sugar syrup and maltodextrin, to prevent crystallisation), vanilla salt (Maldon salt mixed 20:1 with vanilla powder), and a crumble made from crushed malted milk biscuits, quickly baked with lemon zest and a pinch of vanilla salt. If that all sounds a bit of a faff after the effort of making the tart, you will be pleased to hear that it goes very well with whipped cream, too.