Galettes are a fast and sophisticated route to dinner or dessert. Fast because you can forget the precision of crimping and fluting edges; sophisticated for no other reason than it’s French. The crust bakes up tender instead of flaky, which can make a rich filling less overwhelming, and you can fill it with anything–roasted vegetables, peaches, apples, frangipane and plums. If it sounds like a good idea, it probably is. The dough is wetter, more pliable, easier to handle, and harder to mess up than American-style pie dough, so it’s great for handpies and new pie-makers. If you’re short on time and patience, give a galette a try.
Galettes can be baked in a regular pie dish, freeform on a cookie sheet (just make sure not to go overboard on the filling or the juices will certainly overflow), or in a cast iron skillet. There’s no secret to how to use a skillet here–the iron conducts heat better than glass or ceramic, so your pie might bake faster, that’s all.
I prefer to use my cast iron pan because it looks cool. When I bring it to the table, people expect to see roast chicken or cornbread or something equally Americana, and instead they get a lazy french tart. This is, in a nutshell, my main recipe-creation strategy: start with something familiar, make something essential about it unfamiliar, and bam, you’ve got everyone’s attention. You can do that with ingredients. You can do that with booze. You can even do it with dishes.
Because I’m accustomed to making mile-high American-style pies, I tend to overfill my galettes. The only consequence of this habit worth considering is that the juice inevitably bubbles out and caramelizes around the edge of the pan. This is annoying if you’re not actually using a pan to bake your galette. But if you are, like me, using a cast iron skillet, and if you, like me, sprinkle the top of your galette with crunchy sugar, than you are, like me, creating the sweet equivalent of the toasted cheese on the edge of the nacho pan. Otherwise known as “the best part.”
Galette Dough
1 and 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons butter cut into 1/2 inch chunks
1/4 cup sour cream
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1/4 cup ice water
demerara sugar (for sprinkling)
Whisk the sour cream, lemon juice, and ice water in a two-cup liquid measuring cup and chill it in the freezer while preparing the flour and fat.
In a medium bowl, combine flour and salt. Toss in the butter and rub it into the flour between your fingers and thumbs, letting the chunks drop back into the bowl. Keep breaking up big butter pieces until you have a few walnut-sized pieces, a handful of almond-sizes pieces, and a lot of pea-sized pieces.
In a thin stream, pour half the chilled liquid over the flour and fat mixture. Toss everything lightly a couple times, then pour almost all of the rest of the liquid in a thin stream over the dough. Toss again. The dough should hold together (no puffs of dry flour) and feel tacky. Expect it to feel much wetter than American pie dough, but not so wet that it’s like batter. The dough should hold together easily in a ball. Add the rest of the liquid, if needed.
Gather the dough into a ball and firmly, with your palms and thumbs, press the dough into a thick disc. Wrap it in plastic and refrigerate it for a half hour or so.
Prepare your filling, whatever it may be. I’ll have lots of recipes for this on Pie-Scream soon.
When rolling it out, use lots of flour on your rolling surface and pin. I roll it out directly on the counter, lifting and turning the dough with a pastry scraper periodically so it doesn’t stick. You can also roll it out on wax or parchment paper.
Once the dough is about 1/4-inch thick and in a large round, transfer it to your pie plate. I do this by rolling it over my rolling pin or folding the dough in half, then in quarters, and lifting it into the pan. You can also just transfer the dough on its parchment paper to a cookie sheet.
Layer the filling in the dough. Grab the edge of the dough and pull it toward the center of the galette. Grab another spot about three or four inches down and pull it toward the center, creating a sweet little mess of pleats. You might have a big open window in the center of your galette where you can see the filling, or you might have just a crack between the edges of the dough where the filling peaks out. It depends on how big your pan is, and it’s all good as long as there is a still a hole for steam to vent through. Brush with milk, dust with sugar or salt, and bake according to the instructions in your recipe.
Tags: french tart, galette, pie, pie crust, savory pie, sweet pie
