Pear, bacon and blue cheese puff pastry tart is an easy, four-ingredient recipe for a snack, a lunch meal or a bite to serve to friends.

No-recipe recipe
I am feeling slightly embarrassed writing this: to claim that this is a recipe that needs a list of ingredients and steps of instruction is quite preposterous. Shop-bought puff pastry topped with a few slices of deliciously combined ingredients and baked until golden is something anyone of us can surely do without a patronising blogger’s post.
But since I’ve already started and this is how I earn my living (by posting recipes, not by being patronising, I hope), I’ll continue with some quite relevant stuff about puff pastry.
The great puff pastry con
You’d think you can’t go wrong with puff pastry, wouldn’t you? Go to the supermarket and grab it off the shelf, right? Wrong.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d smell a plot. Even though vegans constitute around 2% of the British population, the default puff pastry on supermarket shelves is the vegan type.
It contains a mix of awful oils and margarine instead of butter, plus a bunch of emulsifiers, stabilisers and flavourings. Pretty obvious: genuine puff pastry is basically butter and flour. If there’s no butter, it must be ultra-processed and chemically tinkered in order to remotely resemble the real thing. And it does that very remotely indeed. It doesn’t flake properly when baked, and it tastes like cardboard.
Proper stuff still exists, but you have to search for it. And the labelling is scandalous: both the market leader and a posh supermarket’s own brands call it ‘ready rolled puff pastry’, instead of marking it as vegan. The real pastry has a qualifier in the name: ‘all-butter puff pastry’ which suggests the vegan type is default.
That’s all, in my view, completely wrong. Needless to say butter puff pastry is in much shorter supply: people are not stupid, though it’s easy to make a mistake, like I did, with that labelling con. be careful, the next time you want to grab a puff pastry packet off the shelf!
How to handle puff pastry?
For a quick recipe like this, there’s no need to roll it out any more than it is unless you buy a block of pastry. Just cut the required shape and fold the edge around it to create a rim. I don’t bother brushing it with egg either, though it does give the pastry a nice sheen, but it’s a waste of a whole egg.
It’s easier to handle and unroll puff pastry if it’s been at room temperature so take it out of the fridge fifteen minutes earlier. But it bakes better from cold, so you could assemble the tart and chill it briefly, if time allows.
How to assemble the tart?
Whichever type of blue cheese you go for, I wouldn’t pick an expensive, mature one. Danish blue, gorgonzola or Saint Augur will do very well because you want it creamy and soft, to melt over the pastry.
You can slice the pear with a knife but I’m giving you a good hack to slice it using the vegetable peeler. That will produce perfectly thin slivers. A peeler has more uses than just peeling!
I don’t recommend precooking the bacon: it needn’t be crisp in this recipe, and within the nearly half an hour of the tart baking, it will be thoroughly cooked.
And with the cheese as the base, and pear slices and bacon pieces scattered over it it’s ready to go, with a sprig or two of thyme for the fragrance.
It’s as nice straight from the oven as at room temperature.
More puff pastry tart recipes
Asparagus tart on puff pastry, modestly cheesy but superiorly easy to make. It’s a delightful springtime brunch or lunch dish, making the most of the short British asparagus season while it lasts.
Upside down tomato tart with roasted tomato slices and puff pastry base. Large and fleshy tomato slices caramelised in the oven, then baked under a round of puff pastry, that's an easy summer tart.
Fig and prosciutto tart with ready-rolled puff pastry takes about five minutes to prepare and twenty to bake. A divine, seasonal lunch or starter dish, best made with gorgeous Bursa figs.
More savoury pear recipes
Black rice risotto cooked Italian style, with poached pear quarters and gobbets of blue cheese, is the best way to enjoy the black or purple, ‘forbidden’ rice variety.
Pear and grilled halloumi salad with roasted parsnip and salty pumpkin seeds. Everything is there: the wholesome, the sweet, the salty and the crunch. A perfect salad?
Sausage, pear and root vegetable tray bake with chestnut mushrooms and rosemary is an easy one pan dish that hits the comfort spot.