Market Day Canelé’s savory tart is a scrapbook of sorts for owners Gil Ortale and Nem Ngo. It’s sold at farmers’ markets on weekends, each tart a collection of every interaction they’ve had through the week, shopping from their fellow vendors at Rittenhouse, Headhouse, Chestnut Hill, and Swarthmore Farmers’ Markets, and filling in the gaps at Reading Terminal Market, where Ortale once ran Fireworks, a charcoal-grill stall four decades ago.

It’s tomato season, and the Market Day savory tomato tart ($30) is an ode to this area’s most covetable, most anticipated fruit. Crimini and white button mushrooms, corn, herb-roasted cotto ham from Claudio, Alderfer Farm eggs, and gruyère play supporting roles to the tomato slices splayed across its top. It’s a tart that’s also a philosophical meditation on produce.

“Flavors [in my cooking] should be crystal clear examples of the very thing you imagine,” said Ortale, whose resume reads like a highlights reel of Philadelphia’s most storied restaurants, as he has worked everywhere from Frog to La Terrasse. “Like when you’re a child and tasting herring or Roquefort for the first time.”

Ortale’s goal is to make food that tastes exactly like one’s first recollection of tasting any food. And so, his tomato tart reminds me of the first time I tasted fresh tomatoes cooked gently on a pizza, when I was five years old. It made me think of the first time I had sweet, fresh corn and the kernels burst in my mouth, and the savory British pies I ate growing up in Hong Kong.

It’s so good that I was hesitant to write about it, as Ortale and Ngo usually only make two dozen to sell every week, and if you get one, there’s far less of a chance I’ll be able to get one.

The crust is intentionally imperfect and not uniform, which makes it so flaky, it will stop you in your tracks, mid-bite. Ortale makes every single tart by hand. He doesn’t use a mixer or a Robot Coupe. “He blends the butter into the dry ingredients for each dough ball. That’s why they taste the way they do, they’re light and never stodgy,” said Ngo. “You can’t get that without elbow grease. It can’t be done with a machine.”

This approach is also why Market Day Canelé has never opened a brick-and-mortar bakery. They have no desire to scale up.

“We’re not hardcore capitalists. We just genuinely want to make good food. The farmers’ market industry is the most supportive and values-driven part of the food economy. People are shopping there because they want to know where their food is coming from and they want to see the faces of the people who make the food. We try to uphold that by doing everything by hand, with love, and to the best of our ability,” said Ngo.

The airy, honey-combed crevices of beeswax and butter-slicked canelés may be the emblem of their business. They certainly have sent Ortale and then Ngo down an obsessive path of perfecting a corner of French-rooted baking traditions. But their savory tarts, with a rotation of ultra-local ingredients, many sourced from their friends, are the finest illustration of how skilled hands and devotion to one’s community can produce extraordinary things.

Market Day Canelé, instagram.com/marketdaycanele. Hours: Every Saturday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Rittenhouse Farmers’ Market and every Sunday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Headhouse Farmers’ Market. Every other Saturday: Chestnut Hill Farmers’ Market and Swarthmore Farmers’ Market, 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.