Lebaran (religious holiday that marks the end of Ramadan) is time to fully charge your sweet tooth, isn’t it? One of the most popular cookies during Lebaran is Nastar (ananas tart), an Indonesian pineapple tart.

Making good pineapple tarts can’t be done in a flash. It takes time, a very long one (this is the reason why the nastar price is expensive). Unless you buy a readymade pineapple jam which – I won’t do that anyway because it contains preservatives. After – at least 2 hours – cooking mashed pineapples to make pineapple jam, it does however still takes time to rest them till cool, shape them into little balls and leave into firm. But the journey isn’t finished yet, you still have to make the pastry, divide them into little balls, flatten and place the jam balls in the middle of the dough and roll into a bigger balls now filled with jam. While the last step which takes time also is bake them. And guess what, with the more than 4 hours process, I believe the nastar will be gone in not more than an hour!

A quite long journey, huh?

I actually not that patient to follow all the steps, but lately I am craving for nastar. So I cheat a little by making the nastar into pie. Yes, into a pineapple jam filled pie or Ananas Pie. It saves much time and energy, but the best part is, the taste is the same!

You could use any nastar recipe you want, but here I use pie recipe for the pastry which is will be more crumbly and hard to shape as balls if you make it as traditional nastar. While for the pineapple jam, because it takes hours to cook, so I make a big batch which will be enough to make 4 pie filling.

Pineapple Jam

Ingredients:

3 pineapple or about 1,2 kg peeled pineapple (don’t forget to remove the eyes), blend until smooth

5 cm cinnamon stick

3 cloves

300 gr sugar

Pinch of salt

Pastry ingredients (from Gourmet Travelers)

250 gr plain flour

60 gr icing sugar

160 gr cold unsalted butter, coarsely chopped

2 egg yolks

Directions:

Pineapple jam: put all the ingredients except sugar in a wok. Cook until almost dry, add sugar, stirring occasionally till light brown and thick. Rest to cool.

For pastry: process flour and sugar in food processor to combine, add butter and pulse until mixture resembles fine crumbs. Add yolks and process until mixture comes together. Turn out onto a work surface, bring together with the heel of your hand, form into a disc. Wrap in a plastic wrap and refrigerate to rest (30 minutes).

Pre heat oven to 170 C.

Roll out pastry on a lightly floured surface to 2 mm thick, line base and sides of 4 cm deep, 20 cm diameter tart tin, trim edges. Spread the jam 4 mm thick (Keep in jar the remaining jam, refrigerate up to a month).

Roll out remaining pastry on a floured surface to 3 mm thick, cut out assorted start with pastry cutters, offset on pastry. Brush lid and starts with egg wash. Bake until golden and crisp (1 hour).

Dig in.