Crostata

The 2010 November Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Simona from briciole. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make pasta frolla for a crostata. She used her own experience as a source, as well as information from Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. This is crostata (tart), an Italian dessert. The base of a crostata is pasta frolla (or pastafrolla), sweet short crust pastry (or sweet tart dough) made of flour, sugar, butter and eggs. Pasta frolla is versatile: it provides the base to make crostata with fruit preserves, pastry cream, fresh fruit, ricotta, and other ingredients, and, by itself, it makes very nice cookies.

I made the pastry but did substitute 1/2 the flour for gluten free. I am not coeliac but I am wheat intolerant so I use a mix. I made a pumpkin crostata
I steamed the pumpkin and it was a bit watery so I added cinnamon, nutmeg, 2 beaten eggs and 2 tablespoons of plain flour. then baked it for 45 minutes. It was beautiful and a blackberry crostata rustico, the berries where frozen so I tossed them with a tablespoon of tapioca flour and a tablespoon of sugar

The Rustico is just a big circle of the dough rolled out with the fruit tossed in cornflour and sugar piled in the middle and the pastry turned back over and then cooked.