Garry Watson of Gordon’s Restaurant focuses on getting the best flavour out of courgettes with his filo and feta tart
Courgettes are one of the most prolific vegetables grown by home gardeners and often cultivated in abundance.
It’s important to harvest them keenly every day, as a couple of days in the lifespan of a courgette is an age. They turn from nice, young, sweet vegetables into large hollow marrows overnight. Courgettes are best eaten when they are nice and young, and they respond most favourably to high heat cooking.
The velvety texture lends itself brilliantly to purees and soups, flavoured with other ingredients such as parmesan cheese or a powerful herb like marjoram.
Courgette flowers are delicious cooked in crisp batter, and eating the flowers before they become a vegetable is also a good way of controlling the number of courgettes you will be finding a home for later in the season.
My courgette flan concentrates on pure flavour and is very versatile. The filo pastry is light and contains a fragrant bite as you find the pesto. It is ideal served as a vegetarian dish or as an accompaniment to a main course or it can be served as a small starter course.
Layer up 3 sheets of filo pastry, brushing each layer with melted butter then cut out 4 discs about 5” diameter. Arrange on baking tray a put aside. Blanch, peel and deseed 6 plum or vine tomatoes and cut flesh into 1/2 cm dice. Slice 4 courgettes into 3mm thick rounds. Shallow fry and half cook by tossing in a little rapeseed oil along with 1 clove of crushed garlic. Spread cooked courgette on a tray and allow to cool.
Arrange the courgette on the filo discs in concentric circles until the disc is covered. Place the dice tomato in the centre along with some pesto sauce then season flans with salt and pepper. Sprinkle with 175g diced feta cheese and 25g of pine kernels.
Bake at 200C/Gas 6 for about 8 minutes. Garnish with freshly cut basil and drizzle with aged balsamic.
Chef’s tip: A very handy way of removing the skin from a tomato is to use a gas blowtorch used similar to the type used by plumbers. Simply spike the tomato with a fork and run the flame quickly over the skin. The skin will blister and peel off easily. The same will happen to your skin, given the chance, so be careful and turn the torch off as soon as you’ve finished.
