A-peeling French Pastry

Hey guys! This week I was able to create a delicious French pastry called a galette! This awesome dish is essentially just a pie that are baked on a sheet tray, it’s super easy and is a beautiful centrepiece at mealtimes. Galettes can be made both savoury or sweet, or even both if you’re feeling adventurous, and are extremely easy to adapt. My partner and I decided on making a savoury curry potato galette and it turned out amazing! It was quite a fun experience coming up with flavour combinations and just letting our creativity go wild for a bit. We took inspiration from so many different group ideas such as a mac and cheese galette, a sweet blueberry galette, and even a 3 cheese galette idea. However, we decided on a curry potato galette as potatoes seemed to have a special place in our hearts haha! Since this is a pastry dough it is extremely important that you use ice water. Using lukewarm or warm water will result in the butter melting faster and faster making it more difficult to handle the dough. This leads into the next tip, work fast! Pastry dough gets super flaky and puffed up because there is solid butter that melts in the oven to create little air pockets. The more you work on the dough with your hand, the warmer the dough gets which results in the butter melting and a dense galette. Another thing to keep in mind is that almost anything works with this recipe. If you have leftover veggies, then go ahead and sauté them and put ‘em in the galette! If you have some berries that are getting old, make a jam filling or even just cut them up and put it in the galette! The possibilities are endless for this recipe and it is an extremely easy way to reuse old food just sitting in the fridge or pantry. Keep in mind that you can cook up the filling before adding it into the galette as that will be all the cook time it has; you don’t want an undercooked filling to ruin the flaky pastry! For my dish we had cut up potatoes and layered them in the galette, however, it did not occur to us that the potatoes would not cook through in the oven and so we were eating half cooked potatoes on a bed of flaky pastry. A helpful tool for slicing things thinly to ensure the product will be cooked through is a mandolin! These tools are very helpful to cut thin slices of almost anything, if you don’t have one at home then pre-cooking the filling would be the next best thing. 

Galette Recipe

Ingredients

2 Cups of all purpose flour

2 1/4 tsp of salt

3/4 cup of chilled unsalted butter (cut into pieces)

1/2 cup of ice water

2 Large potatoes (thinly sliced)

4 Tbsp of curry spice blend

1/4 Crème fraîche

Steps

For the pastry

1. Mix the flour and salt

2. Add the butter and mix

3. Add the water tablespoon by tablespoon and mix to create a shaggy dough. It won't look right but trust the process

4. Wrap it and let it rest in the fridge overnight

5. Roll out the dough the next day and place filling inside

6. Fold the sides over the filling in a pattern, leaving the centre uncovered for aesthetics

For the filling

1. Slice potatoes thinly on a mandolin

2. Microwave for about a minute with water to pre-cook the potatoes

3. Mix in crème fraîche and curry spices until all the potatoes are covered

4. Place filling in the pastry dough and bake at 400 C for 15 min then lower to 350 C for 40 minutes

5. Let rest then enjoy!