Cheesy sweetcorn tart

I’m having the year of the sweetcorn. My weekly fruit and vegetable market this season delivered ears and ears of absolutely gorgeous corn every week. I’m roasting it whole, stripping the kernels and cooking them in cream or just in butter, I’m adding it to salads or just eating it off the cob, biting round and round and round.

This is a different use of the sweetcorn – as a topping for a tart. And a good use of the odd frozen pizza dough ball sometimes knocking about the freezer. Made from scratch or shop bought – I won’t judge you.

5 things to do with a spare pizza ball

Those (superior and smug) of us who make their own pizza from scratch, dough and all, always end up with a leftover dough ball in the freezer. So what can you do with an odd frozen chunk or two of dough?

The obvious use, you can make pizza. I defrost it beforehand and proceed as with fresh, gutted that there is only one of those.

You can also make a scaccia which is another wonderful Italian food invention: pizza dough rolled out really thin and folded, folded and folded with whatever filling you have at hand. Tomato sauce. Cheese. Leftover broccoli.

Turn your back on Italy and make pissaladière with your pizza dough. It’s pizza, only French and so it is topped with things like onions and anchovies rather than tomato and cheese. De-li-choose aussi.

Go even deeper into fusion territory and fashion pretzels out of the dough. They will taste really good I promise, as long as you follow the shaping and cooking directions and sprinkle them with plenty salt crystals.

And finally my favourite: a tart. Savoury not sweet, for dinner not dessert. I never top it with anything heavy or stodgy, no meat but rather plants, green ones like beet leaves, spinach – or with sweetcorn.

How to make corn tart base from pizza dough

You could just roll out the dough and use it like that but it might end up dry. I like to zing it up and turn it into something more similar to short crust, be it Italian or French.

All it needs is a little oil and cheese kneaded into the dough, or oil and a lot of cheese, depending on your appetite. I roll the dough out roughly, drizzle it with oil then sprinkle cheese and knead it back up hotch-potch style. Roll, drizzle, repeat.

I also like to build my tart in a hot frying pan to crisp the base up and even char it a little. Then I slip it onto a baking tray and finish it off in the oven.

The topping of the corn tart

It couldn’t be simpler as it’s just cooked corn kernels, stripped off the cob. You might want to conventionally boil the cobs but I swear by roasting them as the flavour is incomparably nicer.

So when the base is sizzling faintly in the pan, scatter the kernels all over. Season with smoked paprika if you like and add plenty of chopped coriander. And then the cheese – my portion was sensible but up the ante if you wish and use even twice as much.

It’s gorgeous warm and really nice cold as well. And yes, you can use frozen cooked sweetcorn on it out of season.