Dark Chocolate Tart with Kumquat Marmalade

Pulse the flour and salt in a food processor. Add the butter. Pulse until the butter and flour start to look like corn meal. Add the water pulsing in between each tablespoon until the whole thing just barely begins to come together. If you don't need all the water, don't use it. Pour out onto a spread piece of suran wrap and work the dough together to form a cohesive ball. Flatten the ball into a disk and let it rest in the fridge for a while. At least a half hour, but up to a few days is ok.

Take the dough out of the fridge and let it rest at room temp for a half hour or so. When it starts to feel malleable, roll it out until it's about 1/4 of an inch thick. I like to use rice flour on the surface and rolling pin to help with this. It prevents sticking without really incorporating itself into the dough.

Mold the dough into your tart pan and again let it rest for a little while in the fridge while you preheat your oven to 350. Line the shell with parchment and fill with rice or beans or those fancy pie marbles. Bake for about 45 minutes, but really just look for the shell to brown a bit and pull away from the sides of the mold. Let the shell cool completely (I throw it in the fridge) while you make the marmalade and the ganache.

MARMALADE: Slice the kumquats in half length wise and take out the seeds. Slice them thinly and mix in a bowl with the sugar. I usually do this while my dough rests before I roll it out. The fruit and sugar need to sit together for about an hour or more so that the kumquats release all their juice.

After the kumquats and sugar are nice and soupy, heat them in a small sauce pan until they have a really good boil going. Let them boil together for a few minutes until they start to gel. When you tilt the pan the whole mass will move together. It'll gel more as it cools.

GANACHE: The most important part here is a high quality chocolate. Don't bother with anything that doesn't taste good to eat on it's own. Check the ingredients. The fewer the better. Ideally all you want to see is cocoa mass, sugar and cocoa butter. Some good stuff has a little vanilla and even some lecithan in it. But try the chocolate before you use it. If it's waxy don't bother.

Heat the cream to a boil. Pour over broken up chocolate. Let the whole thing sit for a couple minutes. Add the pinchof salt. Whisk until smooth.

ASSEMBLY: Spread marmalade in a thin layer at the bottom of the tart shell. Pour ganache over everything evenly while still warm. Smooth with an offset. Let it cool completely before cutting into it so the ganache can set.

I like to garnish it with either a wheel of kumquat or a little pile of pistachio grains. The pistachio adds some crunch and a little color!