Potato, leek, blue cheese and honey galette
A perfect bank holiday dish, plus galette variations and tips on how to make these beautifully adaptable and stress free pies.
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The New York Times reckons that galettes, the rustic free-form lidless pies, reached peak popularity during the pandemic. Much less faff than sourdough bread, more forgiving than pies made in a dish or tin, and endlessly adaptable, they certainly appealed to weary home cooks during those dreadful days of lockdown. But galettes were, in fact, hugely popular in all their leaky, messy loveliness long before then.
I developed a series of them for my vegan cookbook in 2015 and let me tell you I was following a fashion, certainly not forging one. Perhaps in the US, where pies ensconced in dishes are deeply rooted in the culinary culture, going free form just took a bit longer to really catch on.
Galette is a strange term. It refers to various different types of flat and round ‘cake’, the word deriving, wonderfully, from galet, a pebble weatherworn to a shape that’s perfect for skipping, according to Alan Davidson’s indispensable The Oxford Companion to Food.
The most famous galette of all is the regal puff pastry galette des rois. But Larousse lists an array of regional versions that makes me want to grab my rolling pin just typing out their descriptions: walnut or chestnut from Corrèze, candied fruits from Roussillon, curd cheese from Jura and the lemon-scented buttery, sugary brioche from Pérouges. And of course, buckwheat pancakes from Brittany, are also known as galettes.
The ones I love to make are the rough and tumble versions with either a fruit or savoury filling. You can pretty much pile your favourite ingredients in the centre of a pastry sheet, fold up the edges and job done. I love the simplicity; rolling out dough and manoeuvring it safely into a tin is always stressful, no matter how many times you’ve done it. And blind baking, which is not required with galettes, well … the day is always better if you haven’t had to grapple with baking beans.
I tend to use the same basic pastry recipe for both sweet and savoury galettes. It’s a little more robust than the pastry I use to line tines or dishes, with a lower butter to flour ratio. To my mind, without the scaffolding of a tin, pastry needs to be a little sturdier so the folded-over edges stay pert, without slumping completely. For the same reason, I leave the pastry to chill longer in the fridge than for other pies/tarts; in very cold pastry the butter takes longer to melt than in mildly cold pastry, and so it holds its shape better/longer in the oven.
These days, if I remember to do it, I roll out the pastry to the desired size and chill it flat, rather than chilling a disk of pastry and then rolling it out. I can’t remember where I learned this technique but it’s a good one; a disk of rock hard pastry can be impervious to a rolling pin without an aggravating struggle. You do need a board or a baking sheet large enough to accommodate the rolled out pastry but small enough to fit in your fridge. If you don’t have these things, not a problem. Just roll out the dough from cold.
For sweet galettes, I simply toss chopped fruit in a little sugar and a tablespoon or two of cornflour. This results in a filling of tender fruit in syrup rather than a flood of runny juice. Sometimes, I also scatter ground almonds over the base to prevent a soggy bottom, and Demerara sugar over the folded egg-washed pastry edges for crunch.
In this week’s recipe, I’ve used half wholemeal spelt flour/half plain white flour for the pastry. It’s crumbly and delicious and almost biscuit-like, so it makes a beautiful companion to the cheesy filling. On that point, I urge you to use a strong
no-holds-barred blue cheese because the whole point of the honey is to provide a gorgeous sweet counterpoint to its salty pungency.
If your galette emerges from the oven a little inelegant, leaking cheese and slightly lopsided, exalt in the knowledge that’s how it’s meant to look. Serve with a crunchy salad. Happy bank holiday weekend.