A Love Letter to Galettes

A Love Letter to Galettes

Or, The Intern Channels Alison Roman Energy

Photography: Siobhan Egan & Sophie Leopold / Styling: Sophie Leopold

Seasonal produce comes and goes, but an adaptable gallette formula deserves a slot in your repertoire year round. Although rhubarb’s prime growing time is fleeting, honing your pastry touch and a rustic baking style are skills that pair well with any fresh fruit or vegetable. Like many good things in the Western carb world, today’s galette concept hails from French tradition. Galettes strike the same glorious balance between polish and prestige as your favorite antique trestle table. It’s joie de vivre, or je ne c’est quoi, or your other go to phrase to describe something decidedly simple in its sophistication . 

Now that you’ve made small talk, here comes the hard sell for galettes. Pies flaunt intricate latices, blind baking, symmetrical crimping, and expertly torched meringues. Their culinary cousin, on the other hand, is here for last minute brunches, late night pastry cravings, and one hour start to finish time slots. Pies have an expectational element. Looking at you, classic American apple. Galettes are ready to be innovated and riffed upon to become whatever you need them to be. Make it sweet, make it savory, make it light, make it rich - the options, and their variations, abound. 

Galettes call for little to no speciality equipment or groceries. While pastry crust takes more than a minute to master, the shopping list is rather straightforward. With high quality butter, flour (alternative grains are welcome to the mix), salt, and ice water, you too can have a taste of granny’s, or the diner’s, finest. We believe hand blending is superior to the food processor, and no one’s palette has ever detected the difference of crust rolled out by a wine bottle. 

If cooks learned anything these past few months, it was how to work with what we have. Move over florals, improvisation is this year’s spring-to-summer trend. Galettes remain steady throughout swaps and substitutions. The one Siobhan photographed here was inspired by Alison Roman’s Rhubarb-Almond Galette on page 285 of Dining In, her highly recommended cookbook of “highly cookable recipes.” I used an all butter, whole wheat flour crust stashed in the freezer from an indefinite date. It did the job. I couldn’t find almond paste, so I whipped the idea of frangipane with an egg, egg yolk, spoonful of sugar, almond extract, and enough ground almonds to bind. Again, it did the job. 

Even the seasoned pie perfectionist should give galettes a shot. The crust to filling ratio alone is worth experiencing. It’s roughly half and half, a real display of ingredient democracy. While pie centers ooze, galettes retain a tidy slice, give or take some crumbs. Set the pie chart aside, and let a galette fraction into servings effortlessly. Far easier to cut yourself “just another sliver.” At Paprika Southern, we also wouldn’t gawk at ice cream on the peripheral. With galettes, it’s a you do you attitude. Happy baking!