Trader Joe’s doesn’t work all that hard to hide the fact that their Tarte line is actually made by a French brand called Maître Pierre. In fact, TJ’s still sells Maître Pierre products without rebranding them sometimes; the Maître Pierre Tarte d’Alsace flatbread is an example. And if you compare the package design — and even the font choices — of the Trader Joe’s tartes and the Maître Pierre flatbreads, you’ll see that they’re basically the same thing.
Now, we’re not saying all that because we’ve uncovered some deep, sinister conspiracy in the frozen food world; we only point it out to emphasize the fact that Trader Joe’s tartes are an authentic French product. If you want some facts about this dish, Trader Joe’s has a pretty good writeup about it.
So all of this information is bouncing around in our brains as we’re sitting before the Trader Joe’s Tarte au Brie et aux Tomates, which we’re reviewing today. Note that we’re always tempted to refer to these as flatbread pizzas, but we’re going to do our best to resist that temptation today.
Cooking this is simple: Preheat the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit, then place the tarte on a baking sheet and slide it into the oven for 11 to 13 minutes. (If you want to know more about cooking this, the image above has some cooking info, and the full cooking instructions are posted at the bottom of this review.)
Now, we should mention that we had a little bit of trouble with the tarte sticking to our baking sheet. You could probably mitigate this with some cooking spray or just a spritz of oil (olive oil is probably a good choice). We didn’t do any of that, and the center of our tarte stuck to the pan pretty aggressively. We did manage to salvage this, but as you can see in the image below, this is certainly not the prettiest meal we’ve ever made.
All that said, the flavor is really good. This uses a brie cheese with a crème fraîche sauce, meaning this ends up being really creamy — both in consistency and flavor. In case you’re not familiar, crème fraîche is a fattier version of sour cream that’s popular in Europe. It’s hard to deny that it’s a really great-tasting flavor combo, and that’s definitely the best part of this entire meal.
We’re less enthused about the tomatoes. While we appreciate what the folks at Trader Joe’s (or Maître Pierre, to be more accurate) were going for here, but we personally find these to be a little tart for our liking. The creamy sauce is supposed to mitigate that a bit, but we found the flavors to be a bit at odds with each other.
And then there’s the crust. Our feelings on this crust are mixed, to say the least. If you can grab a piece right out of the oven (be careful, it will be super hot), the edges of the crust are amazing. They end up with a warm, pastry taste and feel that really complements the dish. However, if you let it cool for even ten minutes, it gets hard and almost brittle. It still tastes great, but it becomes much less enjoyable to actually eat because it’s hard to bite through.
And that’s to say nothing of the center, which stays mushy, even when you overcook it a bit (like we did). In fact, a huge part of the reason our tarte fell apart so badly is that the center is almost a liquid, and the only part that has any form is the part that stuck to the pan!
Trader Joe’s recommends half of a tarte as a serving size. If you stick with that, you’re at 300 calories and 650 mg of sodium. So if you gulp down the whole thing in a sitting (which is very easy to do because this is not big), you’re up to 600 calories and 1,310 mg of sodium. Both those numbers are pretty high, but we’ve actually encountered single-serve meals have more sodium and more calories than that. Considering this is a pizza — err… a tarte — with an incredibly rich sauce, that’s not really that bad.
The Trader Joe’s Tarte au Brie et aux Tomates is a bit of a mess. Ours stuck to the pan so hard that we struggled to remove it, and once we did, we found a tasty-yet-deeply-flawed batch of food. We think the other tartes in this line — the Tarte d’Alsace and the Tarte aux Champignons — are much better options than this one. This is sort of the ugly duckling of the bunch, though that’s a flawed comparison because we’re not expecting this to eventually become a beautiful swan.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Trader Joe’s tarte flatbread, check out our package scans below.
