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Cranberry & Blue Cheese Tart with Pear Salad

Use up the remains of the cheeseboard and your cranberry sauce in this sweet-savoury tart

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Why it works: Blue cheese and pear share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 40 recipes mention both. Both carry ethyl pentanoate, which smells yeast, fruit. The science ↓

The recipe

Serves 4
Prep10 min
Cook35 min

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Method written by CompKitchen from the ingredient list. Not the original author's method, not kitchen-tested.

  1. Heat the oven to 200°C (400°F) and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

  2. Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan over medium-low heat, add the sliced onions, and cook for 15 minutes, stirring often, until soft and golden.

  3. Unroll the ready-rolled puff pastry onto the lined baking sheet and score a border about 1 cm in from the edge without cutting through.

  4. Spread the cranberry sauce inside the scored border, then spoon the softened onions over the top.

  5. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes until the pastry is puffed and golden at the edges.

  6. Crumble the blue cheese over the hot tart and bake for 3 to 4 more minutes until the cheese softens.

  7. While the tart bakes, separate the Little Gem leaves, place them in a bowl, and add the sliced pear.

  8. Just before serving, toss the lettuce and pear with the salad dressing.

  9. Cut the tart into four pieces and serve warm alongside the pear salad.

By bbcgoodfood. Recipe from Open Recipes.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Blue cheese + peartop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together40 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  2. Cranberry + peartop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Olive + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Cranberry + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Olive + cranberrytop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together127 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (olive, cranberry, sauce, blue cheese, lettuce, pear):

  1. Tomatobetter flavor fit
  2. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  3. Mustardbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, cranberry, sauce, blue cheese, lettuce, pear. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).