Langhe tart with ricotta and chocolate chips

Who said that all sweets make you fat? With a little ingenuity and creativity you can create many delicious and light desserts.

The secret lies in finding the right “substitutes”, that is those light and low-calorie ingredients, but not for this reason less rich in flavor, such as for example low-fat cheeses, which can be used to prepare light creams to replace more caloric ones such as custard or mascarpone cream.

Among the low-fat cheeses ricotta is the one that fits best into the preparation of desserts and cakes and has in fact been part of the Italian pastry tradition, especially the southern, for a very long time.

The recipe that we propose today is the ricotta and chocolate tart from the Langhe, where ricotta is the protagonist.

Preparation

Start by letting the ricotta drain in a colander to remove excess serum. In the meantime you can move on to the preparation of shortcrust pastry.

Shortcrust pastry

In a bowl pour the flour with the eggs in the middle, the sugar and the softened (but not melted) butter cut into small pieces, the lemon zest that you have previously grated and the vanilla yeast.

Process the ingredients by hand until the pastry turns into a compact dough. Wrap the shortcrust pastry in the foil and let it rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

While the pastry is in the fridge, take care of the ricotta cream.

Ricotta cream

Pour all the ricotta in a bowl, add the sugar and the egg and stir until the cream is smooth and free of lumps, only now add the chocolate chips.

Remove the pastry from the fridge and roll it out on a well floured pastry board. Do not use the whole mixture, but leave enough to make the decoration.

Grease the mold with a diameter of 24 cm and line it with the pastry, place it well with your fingers so that it fits well with the pan.

If you were to “tear up” the pastry at some point don’t worry, just fix it using other pieces of advanced pastry.

Once the pastry is in place make small holes on the base with a fork and then pour the ricotta and chocolate cream, making sure that it is evenly leveled throughout the base.

Garnish

All that remains to do is the garnish: take a toothed wheel and make strips of dough to be placed on the surface of the tart.

You can also have fun creating different shapes than the classic tart strips, you can for example use cookie cutters to make different shapes, such as flowers or stars, to be placed on top of the cake, or if you don’t have molds, use a glass to create round shapes to be arranged as you prefer.

Once you have chosen and made the garnish, bake the tart in a preheated oven at 180 degrees and cook for about 40 minutes.

Before serving the Langhe ricotta and chocolate tart, let it cool and sprinkle with vanilla icing sugar.