Raspberry Rhubarb Galette

Jul 4

Jul 4 Raspberry Rhubarb Galette

An ode to galettes and eating together

Summer is here- or at least in Seattle it's made a few guest appearances, battling out contrastingly grey, blowy mornings. With the arrival of our friend, Summer, comes in season fruit, and therefore pies, galettes, crumbles, and even the occasional fruit salad composed of more than just disappointing melon. I've a bad habit of getting too excited at the grocery store and out-buying my ability to consume and subsequently having to watch my "fruitful" bounty turn on me. This was most recently demonstrated by a haul of blueberries, strawberries, and mangos shriveling up in the fridge, and one is reminded that "cooking for one is not fun!" (or economically reasonable), as I always say.

If we only needed another reason to share our food with others, it would be for the sake of baked goods. The only thing more depressing than watching a pint of strawberries die a slow and painful death in the refrigerator, is watching the better half of a pie lose its flake sitting on the countertop. Pies are really only good for a day, maybe two.

Here is where someone might make the case for 'hand pies' or 'mini galettes' but in the spirit of sharing, because "sharing IS caring" after all, I would implore you to consider the beautiful thing it is to share a pie after a long, meandering dinner with friends and/or family (friends ARE family too- that's written on the chalkboard wall in my kitchen. I wrote it). We need less excuses to eat by ourselves and more excuses for dinner parties.

Speaking of dinner parties, or even just dinners not spent alone, the thing you defintely want to finish that meal off with is a rhubarb galette. Rhubarb has made its seasonal debut and its time to break out the the old baking tray and make a fine dessert of it all.

Galettes are the kind of thing I usually make up, and have certainly never used a recipe for, as opposed to pies, which are admittedly incredibly similar. A galette is a like a pie's more casual cousin. You throw a galette together in an hour, a pie takes an afternoon. There are minimal differences in work and ingredients, but galettes are our friends while pies are more our babies.

The second thing I like about galettes, which you will often hear me preaching about, is the filling to crust ratio! A pie generally has a larger amount of filling to crust. Some pies benefit from this, however rhubarb, in particular, I prefer more crust and less filling. And if we know one thing about pies (and galettes) is that they are nothing, NOTHING, without one hell of a good crust.

Galettes are the pie you can make anytime.

Total Time: About 90 minutes, Active time: about 30 minutes

Ingredients:

For the crust:

2/3 cup chilled butter, cut into cubes

2 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 tsp salt

About 1/4 cup ice cold water

For the filling:

About 2 1/2- 3 cups chopped rhubarb (about 1 pound)

1/2 cup raspberries, fresh or frozen

Scant 1 cup sugar

1 Tbsp flour

A pinch of cinnamon

For the topping:

1 Tbsp butter, cut into small peices

1 egg

About 3 Tbsp additional sugar for topping, demerara or turbinado sugars are nice, but not required.

Method:

Make the filling:

Combine rhubarb, sugar, flour, and cinnamon in a large mixing bowl. Set aside.

Making the Crust:

(Recipe and method adapted from my earlier post, Apple Pie.)

Place flour, butter, and salt into a big mixing bowl (preferably a metal one as it will get colder faster if you put it in the fridge to cool down the ingredients)

I prefer to use a pastry blender to break down the butter into smaller pieces before going in with my hands; this keeps the ingredients from getting too warm too quick. Once the butter has broken down to pieces about the size of cheerios, I put the pastry blender aside and use my hands to break the butter up into much smaller pieces. I do this by rubbing the pieces of butter in between my thumb and fingers as to flake the butter into tiny bits. Ideally, you want about half the mixture to resemble a course meal texture and the other half to have little bits of butter that are about the size of peas. Betty Crocker says the meal texture makes for tenderness and the pea sized bits of butter make for flakiness.

Once your mixture has arrived at the right texture, sprinkle cold water over it 1 tbsp at a time, gently mixing with your hands or a fork until the dough is lightly moist and begins to stick to itself. When you mix, try not to squeeze or be aggresive; be gentle and touch it as little as possible.

Gather the dough at the bottom of the bowl and press it together to form a disc that is about 2 inches thick. (I used to believe in chilling the dough. Now I believe that if you're going to use it straight away, don't bother, it's easier to roll out dough at room tempurature.)

Assembling the galette:

Preheat your oven to 375º F/ 190º C

On a floured surface, roll the dough into a large, 1/8 inch thick rectangle using a medium or large rimmed baking sheet as a guide. If you're using a medium to smaller baking sheet, your dough should probably be larger than your pan, if you're using a large pan you probably won't have enough dough to do that, so don't try.

Transfer your rolled out dough to the rimmed baking sheet.

Pour filling into the center of your rectangle. Spread it out so that you maintain roughly a 2 inch border of dough around the fruit. Dot the top of the rhubarb mixture with the raspberries.

Fold the edges of dough towards the center, there is no special way to do this, just try and make sure the filling is contained. Dot the filling with 1tbsp of butter cut into small pieces.

Make an egg wash by whisking together an egg and a few teaspoons of water. Use a pastry brush to lightly coat the crust with egg wash.

Sprinkle sugar all around the crust and a little on the filling if you feel like it.

Bake for about 1 hour or until crust is golden brown and the filling is bubbling.