An Easy and Modern Lemon Tart

When you’re a test cook, being asked to develop a recipe for a classic item such as lemon tart can be daunting. After all, bakers have been producing handsome, crisp-crusted tarts filled with smooth, bracing, just-sliceable curd for centuries without my assistance. What could I possibly contribute? Well, actually, I had an idea: extra-virgin olive oil.

Admittedly, it’s counterintuitive: Butter is featured in both the crust and the filling of almost every lemon tart. But developing a recipe for an olive oil cake a couple of years ago reminded me that other fats offer advantages, too. Using a liquid fat in that cake made the mixing process easy and quick: There was no softening of the fat and no creaming until light and fluffy, yet the crumb was beautifully plush and fine and the cake had an