Meringue pie with Rhubarb-Bourbon vanilla purée & caramelized mango

This recipe is a good compromise to fill a rainy sunday afternoon and will bring some sunshine in your kitchen. The season of rhubarb is starting, but lots of people don’t like this fruit -which is full of vitamins- because of its acidity. No panic, you just have to match this fruit with the right ingredients to not being confronted with this problem. For this recipe, I chose to associate Rhubarb with Bourbon vanilla to add flavors, but especially with a mature mango, which I caramelized afterward to bring sweetness to the whole. The sweet shortcrust pastry and the meringue also balance the acidity and will give you the feeling to have a fruity sweet in your mouth. There is nothing really complicated to make this recipe, excepting if you’re not well equipped to make the meringue and you don’t have any other choice than to dress it on your tart with a rolled sheet of exercise book as I did (hard sometimes to always be between 2 cities…).

(for one tart)

The sweet shortcrust pastry: 250g flour, 125g butter, 1 egg, 100g sugar, a pinch of salt.
The filling: 1kg rhubarb, 300g + 100g sugar, 1 Bourbon vanilla pod, 1 mango, a big knob of butter.
The meringue: 2 eggs, 100g sugar, a pinch of salt.

1. To prepare the pastry: in a bowl, mix the flour with the salt and the sugar. Cut the softened butter in small cubes and add them into the bowl, then knead the dough with fingers until you obtain a sandy texture. Add the egg and continue to mix the pastry until it gets homogeneous. Shape a ball, film it and put it in the fridge.

2. To prepare the purée: wash and peel the rhubarb stems. Cut them in thin sticks, then put them in a pan with the 300g sugar and the Bourbon vanilla seeds as their open pod; cover the pan and let cook over a low heat about twenty minutes, while stirring sometimes. The texture you get looks like a purée, without being too liquid. Then, let it cooling down.

3. Take out the sweet shortcrust pastry from the fridge and preheat the oven at 190C. Peel the mango, then cut it in tiny cubes (5mm for each side). In a frying pan over a medium heat, add the 100g sugar. When it begins to melt, add the mango cubes and mix with the sugar. Once the mango is getting caramelized, add a knob of butter, stir the whole and let it cooking 2-3 minutes more.

4. Line a buttered pie mould with the sweet pastry. With a fork, make holes into it then put it in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes at 190C. Let cooling down the pastry base, then fill it with the rhubarb-Bourbon vanilla purée. Equalize with a spatula and top the whole with the caramelized cubes of mango.

5. To prepare the meringue: turn the oven temperature over 250C. In a cool bowl with a pinch of salt, beat until stiff the egg whites, while adding gradually the sugar. The meringue has to be firm and bright. Fill a pastry cornet, then arrange some meringue touches on the tart while giving them the shape you want. Put the pie in the oven for approximately 7-8 minutes, until the top of the meringue gilds slightly. Let the pie cooling down and eat it at room temperature.