TWD: Baking with Julia - Berry Galette

Our challenge this week for Tuesdays with Dorie was a Berry Galette!  I was super excited for this one, though a little apprehensive as I would be baking in a different kitchen than normal.  I am currently on vacation and made the galette in my mother-in-law's kitchen in the Catskills.  The excitement part came from going berry picking to get the berries!  Is there anything better than picking the berries right off the bush for your desserts?  It was a wonderful adventure.

We picked blackberries and blueberries.  The clever girl had a great time.  She probably ate more berries than she put in the bucket, especially with the blueberries, a la Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey.  Ker-plink, ker-plank, ker-plunk!



The clever girl did most of her blueberry picking with my niece.  My sister-in-law, brother-in-law, niece and nephew were visiting from Spain!  We don't see them very often so we savor the times we have together.  I never had any idea how great it would be to be an aunt!  My niece and nephew are fantastic!

Our bounty!

On to the baking...  First I made the dough for the galette.  The recipe can be found on pages 371-372 of Baking with Julia.  You can also find the recipes by checking out Lisa's blog, Tomato Thymes in the Garden or Andrea's blog, The Kitchen Lioness.   The recipe provides options to make the dough by hand or in a food processor.  In my kitchen I would have probably used my food processor, but while on vacation, I made it by hand.

The recipe also provides options of using sour cream, yogurt, or buttermilk in the dough.  I used buttermilk, and it was non-fat which is not ideal, but I worked with what I had!  The green bowl contains a mixture of all-purpose flour, cornmeal, sugar and salt.

I added really cold, mostly frozen, butter to the green bowl and cut it with forks and knives to mix it in, until the point where it seemed that the pieces ranged from bread crumbs to pea-sized. 

To this, I added a mixture of buttermilk and water.  The recipe suggests mixing the buttermilk and water together and then mixing it into the dough a tablespoon at a time.  If I did this recipe again, I would not do it this way.  I would mix in the buttermilk (sour cream or yogurt) bit by bit, and then add the water.  That way I could regulate the moisture of the dough better and know that the buttermilk/sour cream/yogurt all got into the mix. 

After the liquid is all mixed in, the dough is divided in half, made into disks, and refrigerated for at least 2 hours.  I refrigerated mine for about a day and a half.  It just worked out that way!

When it was time to make the galettes, I used this amazing pastry board!  It belonged to a friend of my mother-in-law's grandparents, who was a chef.  It is great!  You can't really see from the picture, but there is a raised edge on the back, so the flour stays on the board instead of scooting off onto the counter or table.  And there is another edge on the front that goes down, so it hooks onto the table and thus the board it self can't scoot around either.  It is brilliant.  I want to find something like this.  Anyone know where I can get one?

Anyway, I rolled out the dough to an approximate 11 inch circle and put a mixture of blueberries and blackberries on the top.  I sprinkled sugar over the berries and then drizzled some honey on top.  Finally, I added slivers of butter (1 tablespoon total, cut into slivers).  By the way, the recipe for the berry galette is on page 377 of the book.  Or, check out the blogs I mentioned above for the recipes!

The cool thing about a galette is it's free-form shape.  You just wrap the fruit up in the dough and stick it in the oven.  No perfect pie shape.  It is like a little pastry gift.

The pastry was brushed with water and then sprinkled with sugar for some crunch.  If I was going to make this again, I would substitute the water with milk or cream. 

The galettes are baked on a parchment-lined baking sheet.  Ok, folks.  Learn from my mistake here.  I did not have parchment paper and used waxed paper instead.  BAD IDEA.  The waxed paper got really browned and smoked up the kitchen (not good) and then stuck to the bottom of the galette (really not good).  So even though a package of waxed paper says you can use it for baking, don't do it.  If you don't have parchment paper, do something else.  Maybe buttered foil?

Here is another thing:  when you cook berries, most of the time the juices run.  So make sure you bake a galette with berries inside on a rimmed baking sheet.  If you use a flat baking sheet you risk getting those juices all over the oven!  Thankfully, this did not happen to me but it was uncomfortably close!

The end result?  I feel like the dough was a bit oily or something.  It was not flaky, even though the butter was still in the chunks when it went into the oven.  It was super humid when I baked this galette, so I am sure that did not help.  Regardless, the dough was tough and not so good.  My sweet family devoured it anyway!

So, not a huge success but definitely worth the adventure that it brought!