The Hunger Struck - Confessions of a Food Fanatic.

I don’t think that it’s possible for everything to go smoothly when you cook dinner for your in laws for the very first time. I get extremely nervous when I cook for anyone I’ve never cooked for before, so making mistakes where I normally wouldn’t is usually a defining characteristic of these first time occasions. Naturally this dinner was no exception to the rule.

My problem is that I always try to do too much with too little time and definitely should know better by now. I’ve been doing this for years and apparently have learnt nothing. I won’t go into the details of the dinner and thankfully it all turned out pretty good in the end, but let me tell you it was a struggle getting there not to mention that I looked like I just came in from a 10k run by the time they walked in the door. Not an attractive look for me at all.

Thankfully, I did have enough common sense to keep the dessert part as simple as possible. And thanks to our amazing Okanagan peaches, I had no inclination to complicate things further than I already did with an extravagant baked affair.

For some reason we are still getting some pretty amazing local peaches in Vancouver, seems a little late in the season but I won’t question it. Peaches are my absolute favorite fruit and since peach season started we have had a fridge full of them. They are so perfect right now that this galette required next to no sugar and turned out amazing, crust and all!

Peach Galette

Sweet Galette Dough recipe from finecooking.com

11-1/4 oz. (2-1/2 cups) all-purpose flour

2 Tbs. sugar

1/2 tsp. salt

8 oz. (16 Tbs.) unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces and chilled

5 oz. (about 2/3 cup) ice water

Peach Filling

6 ripe peaches sliced with skins left on

1 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice

2 Tbsp Flour

1-2 Tbsp Butter

3 Tbsp Sugar (may need more if you like it sweet)

1 Tsp Cinnamon

1 Tbsp Raw Sugar for the to

For the dough:

Mix all of the dry ingredients together in the bowl of your stand mixer or food processor, or just a regular bowl if you don’t have one of these. Make sure that the butter is as cold as possible. What I do is cut it into the 1/2 inch pieces, lay them out on a plate and stick in the freezer for 5 – 10 minutes before I add them to the four. This insures that the butter won’t heat up too much when you mix it into the dry ingredients and is especially important if you’re using your hands.

Once the butter is cold mix it into the dry ingredients until it resembles large peas. Make sure not to over mix it though, it’s perfectly fine to still have fairly large pieces floating around. Once the butter is incorporated throw in the ice water all at once and mix until the dough just comes together.

Form into a disc, wrap in plastic and refrigerate for 1 hour.

For the Filling:

Slice the peaches in a bowl add the lemon juice and toss quickly together. Only start the filling once you are ready to roll out your dough.

Once the dough has been chilled, roll it out between 2 sheets of parchment paper until it measures about 9 inches across. Leaving about 2 inches around the outside of the dough arrange the peaches in a circular pattern. Dust the top of them with the flour, sugar and cinnamon. You could also mix these ingredients in the bowl with the peaches before but I find that with ripe peaches and lemon juice there is too much liquid present, which would just dissolve the flour and sugar. Since I didn’t make this in a pie plate of any kind, I also didn’t want to add any of the juice as this would just have made the bottom soggy. Break off small pieces of the butter and distribute across the top of the peaches.

Fold the edge of the dough over the filling and dust the top with the raw sugar. You could also brush the outside with an egg wash if you like, mine browned nicely without it.

Bake at 350 for 50 minutes to an hour.

Let the galette  gcool for a few minutes before you serve. We served ours with vanilla bean ice cream and it was absolutely the perfect ending