Pear Galette

"J’aime la galette, savez-vous comment ? Quand elle est bien faite, avec du beurre dedans." (I like galette, do you know how? When it is made well, with butter inside.)


How many rainy weekend mornings have inspired me to make pastry dough? Like, lots. I close the kitchen door so as not to disturb the one who prefers to sleep in (yes, I have a kitchen door; I think it's weird yet surprisingly useful, in our case) and page through a couple of my favorite books. A recent go-to of mine is a heritage baking book that Joel's sister-in-law sent back with me after our last visit. It's got some lovely old-fashioned recipes for such things as shoo-fly pies, brown betties, crumbles, and bee-sting cakes, all of which are right up my alley. This free-form pear galette was my latest sampling from that book.

Though the dough was not the easiest for me to work with initially, it held together in the end. I think I underused the food processor, for once. But as I said, it still worked. So all in all, a success, at least for French children who have penchants for butter. There were five tablespoons of the stuff inside this 9-inch round, with an extra two drizzled on top of the pears for good measure (with a sprinkle of sugar on top of that, of course). The crust stayed crisp and flaky, and even after sitting overnight, it never became soggy.