Dorie’s Cookies Parmesan Galettes: Ooh La La

Here’s something delightfully intriguing: the Dorie’s Cookies cookbook has a chapter devoted to savoury cookies. I’m not used to seeing non-sweet things in my baking cookbooks, but there are plenty of interesting (and weird: I’m looking at you, hot-and-spicy togarashi meringues and honey-BLUE CHEESE madeleines) recipes here.

(I am never going to make those madeleines. I hate blue cheese.)

A little while ago, I was supposed to head to a friend’s house for a pre-dinner birthday gathering. I thought the Parmesan Galettes sounded perfect for an appetizer, so I decided to try my hand at my first savoury cookie.

(I ended up having to turn the car around and skip the party because the roads were horrible – so I had these all to myself.) (Note: I wrote this post back in February when snow was still a thing…)

The ingredient list is short and sweet: all-purpose flour, butter, Parmesan cheese, and a bit of sea salt. If you’re reading this, I probably don’t have to tell you to buy the kind of Parm that you have to grate yourself. But just in case… there you go.

This recipe doesn’t require a mixer; it uses the food processor to mix the butter, flour, and Parmesan. Here’s how the dough is described: “process in long bursts until you have a moist curds-and-clumps dough”. Although that sounds incredibly vague and non-scientific, somehow, I knew exactly what Dorie meant when the time came.

I’m pretty sure this is what moist curds and clumps looks like?!

It’s super easy to smush the dough into a log. I was surprised at how teeny tiny the log was, but the recipe yielded 15 galettes, as the book said it would. Before slicing, you pop the log into the fridge for a couple of hours (or the freezer for just one hour, if you’re of the opinion that time is money).

After the dough has chilled, it’s time to slice and dice. The sidebar of the recipe says that these galettes pair nicely with a variety of herbs and spices, so I experimented (conservatively) by grinding a bit of fancy pepper over each galette. (If you’re wondering what fancy pepper is, it comes from France and includes tasting notes – thanks Mom and Dad!!!)

Note: If you look closely, you can see that some of my galettes have a tiny hole in the middle. This is because I didn’t roll my log quite tightly enough. Lessons learned!

The cookbook says that you can either bake the sliced galettes in a muffin tin (for a perfect circular shape and satisfying edges) or free-standing on a cookie sheet.

I baked 12 in the muffin tin and the rest on a baking sheet, and while the muffin ones looked prettier, I found they took a little longer to bake than the designated 15 to 17 minutes. They were more like 20 minutes.

Here’s the verdict on the galettes:

I LOVED them. They reminded me of dinner parties when I was younger. I feel like my mom used to serve cheese straws or something that were just like this. I loved the slightly crumbly texture and I thought they tasted just the right amount of Parmesan. I like Parmesan, but usually as a side cheese, not as a cheese on its own. Like, I wouldn’t typically eat Parmesan alone on crackers. These galettes were fantastic and felt fancy to me.

Cedric did not like them. I did not see this coming from a mile away – in our relationship, I am the one who favours sweets and he likes all things savoury (though he’s never met a chocolate chip cookie he didn’t like). Not only that, but he LOVES cheese – including Parmesan. He will gladly slice Parmesan and put it on a panini (which is exactly what he did with the leftover Parmesan from this recipe). But for whatever reason, this recipe didn’t do it for him.

Oh well. More for me!

Bobbette & Belle’s Apple Galettes: Like Cupcakes, but in Pie Form

What’s not to love about a personal apple pie?

After baking Bobbette & Belle’s blueberry hand pies, I fell in love with the idea of individually sized pastries. I don’t like making cakes because I find it’s too much of a good thing – I far prefer cupcakes, which are easier to share. Same goes with pies: making an entire pie seems like such a commitment (who wants pie for dessert… again… for the fifth night in a row), but mini pies? Sign me up.

To be fair, these aren’t mini apple pies – they’re galettes, which are basically a flat pie. (Cedric called them toaster strudels.) They consist of two components: the galette pastry and the apple filling.

The galette uses a standard pastry recipe and, as I’ve come to love with Bobbette & Belle’s recipes, the ingredients can easily be found in any generic store. In fact, you probably have most of them on hand already – this recipe uses all purpose flour rather than pastry flour, for instance.

Though the recipe calls for cutting in the butter with a pastry cutter, I used my hands (as I always do with pastry). The butter cutting is pretty short and sweet, so the damage from the heat of my hand is pretty minimal.

Crumble City, USA

When it comes to handling pastry, less is more. The recipe states, “Turn the dough out onto a work surface and form a disc by pushing it together a few times.” My disc was awfully crumbly (see photo), so I sprinkled an extra tablespoon of ice water (in addition to the 1/4 cup used in the recipe) and it did just the trick to make everything come together in a slightly more solid form. The dough was still a little shaggy as I folded the pastry into thirds, but I used my bench scraper to keep the dough more or less gathered and it seems to have worked out alright.

I don’t own a six-inch round cutter (or a six-inch plate, as the book suggests as an alternate), but I printed out a six-inch round template and used the cut-out as a stencil. It worked just fine.

Though the recipe indicates it makes 5 individual galettes, I had enough dough to cut 8 rounds of pastry – and I didn’t even roll it out all that thin. I had extra scraps, so I freestyled a few festive leaves (viva la fall!)

As for the filling, I stuck with the suggested Granny Smith apples, which aren’t terribly exciting but they do the trick. If I were to make these again, I’d probably mix up a few different varieties of pie-friendly apples. I used five apples instead of four, but I kept the rest of the ingredients the same.

The recipe calls for heating some butter, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and salt. This forms a caramel-like sauce, in which the apples are cooked for just a few minutes. The smell and texture are phenomenal – think caramel apples in a pan. Yum.

 

Even with 8 galettes, I had plenty of apple filling to go around. I probably overstuffed them a little, which made it slightly finicky to fold the sides up, but galettes kind of have a rustic, imperfect look that is very forgiving. I was slightly concerned that the apple filling would ooze out and create a smoky mess in my oven, but that didn’t happen.

I sprinkled each galette with some chopped pecans, topped each with a couple of my pastry leaves, and gave the crusts a little egg wash, then into the oven they went. As I now do with all of my B&B recipes, I gave the galettes extra time in the oven – the book recommends 25-30 minutes, whereas I kept mine in for 45 minutes. (I checked in on them every 5 or so minutes after the first 30 minutes had elapsed. Truth be told, I probably could have kept them in a minute or two longer, but ah well.)

(This is before they were baked, lest you be concerned about the paleness of the pastry.)

After sampling a galette to ensure it was edible (it was), I stacked them in a tupperware with parchment paper between each layer and stored them overnight. We had a couple of friends over the next day, and I heated them up in the oven and served them with my favourite vanilla gelato, the Whistler-made KO Vanilla by Lucia Gelato.

The final product was delicious and perfectly presentable (not pictured: a scoop of gelato melting on top of the galette – YUM). The galettes make for a great autumn dessert. They’re a nice twist on traditional apple pie. Thanks, Bobbette & Belle, for another Magee-approved recipe!

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