Ina Garten's Store-Bought Shortcut For Chocolate Tart Crust

Despite the fact that Ina Garten used to run her own food store in the Hamptons (via Barefoot Contessa), the celebrity chef doesn't do a whole lot of grocery shopping on her own. As she admitted to Cooking Light, she usually has her assistant go to the supermarket for her, and on the rare occasion she takes a trip on her own, she usually sticks to the gourmet aisles. This may not be surprising since her famous line is "store-bought is fine," but contrary to popular belief, Garten doesn't automatically snob anything that isn't homemade.

As she revealed on an episode of "Barefoot Contessa," there are plenty of pantry staples she believes are worth buying from the store, especially dessert ingredients like caramel sauce, chocolate syrup, lemon curd, and puff pastry (via Food Network). And the recipe for her Dark Chocolate Tart from her cookbook "Go-To Dinners," via YouTube, is no exception.

Ina Garten's Dark Chocolate Tart (via Barefoot Contessa) contains three layers of chocolate, one of which is made entirely of store-bought cookies. To make this layer, which forms the crust of the tart, Garten pulverizes an entire box of Nabisco chocolate wafers and combines it with sugar and butter. She then presses the mixture into the bottom of a tart pan before adding the chocolate filling and chocolate glaze.

Since Garten uses Lindt bittersweet chocolate for the rest of the recipe, you might expect the chocolate cookies to cheapen the taste of the tart, but this is hardly the case. "It's basically a graham cracker crust made with chocolate wafers," she explained to the New York Times (via YouTube) "You don't have to make a crust, you don't have to roll it out, and fit it in, and have it shrink, and be annoyed and all that." 

If it tastes good and is easy to pull together, clearly there's no reason not to use the ingredient.