I don’t know why I’ve never thought to make a galette for Thanksgiving, but it feels like a gross oversight on my part.
Galettes are pie’s more chilled out cousins. They’re free-form, don’t require a pie plate or crimping, never need blind-baking, and you can put pretty much anything but custard inside. Easy easy easy, and positively perfect for a busy day like Thanksgiving. I’m mystified as to how I didn’t realize that until now–it’s so obvious!
Today’s galette is filled to the brim with sliced tart apples and sweet ripe pears, and it’s seasoned with cinnamon, cardamom, ginger and nutmeg. I like to think of those spices as somewhere between regular apple pie and chai. Yum!
Assembling an Apple & Pear Galette is as simple as mounding your dough in the center of a piece of pie dough, folding the excess pastry toward the center, and dotting the whole thing with butter. Brush the exposed pie dough with egg wash, sprinkle it with coarse sugar for beauty and crunch, and then bake your galette for about 50 minutes at 375F. You’ll know it’s ready when the filling is bubbling, the pastry is well-browned and your kitchen smells outrageously good—like apples and pears and brown butter.
Another thing galettes have over pies? They cool really quickly. I will pretty much never tell you to slice a pie before it has hit room temperature, which can take hours. Galettes though? They’re thin enough that they can be sliced at warm room temperature without any consequence. This beaut was sliced an hour after it came out of the oven, and the worst thing that happened was that it melted my ice cream slightly more quickly than it would have otherwise. And by worst thing, I mean a very good thing. Very good.
Apple & Pear Galette
makes 1 galette
2 large tart baking apples, peeled, 1/4-inch sliced
2 Bosc or Bartlett pears (about 7-8 ounces each), peeled, 1/4-inch sliced
1 1/2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon Kosher or sea salt
1/2 recipe All-Butter Pie Dough, or other good single crust recipe
2 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces
For assembly:
1 large egg
1 teaspoon water
coarse sugar
For serving:
vanilla ice cream
whipped cream
Arrange oven racks in the upper and lower positions. Preheat oven to 375F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. Set aside.
Combine apple and pear slices in a large mixing bowl. Add apple cider vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, nutmeg, cornstarch, and salt. Stir together with a silicone spatula or wooden spoon and let sit for 15 minutes at room temperature.
Flour a surface and a rolling pin. Roll pie dough out until it is 1/8-inch thick. Trim edges so that you have a 12-inch circle. Transfer to prepared pan. Mound filling in the middle of the dough, leaving at least 2 inches of excess on all sides. Fold dough over the sides of the filling to contain it. Dot exposed filling with butter.
In a small bowl, whisk together egg and water. Brush mixture on exposed pie dough. Sprinkle with coarse sugar.
Bake galette on the upper rack for 25 minutes. Move to the lower rack. Bake for 20-25 more minutes, tenting with foil if anything begins to brown too quickly. Crust will firm up as the galette cools.
Let galette cool completely in the pan on a rack. Remove to a cutting board. Slice and serve with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream, if desired.
Galette will keep covered at room temperature for two days, or in the refrigerator for up to four.
It’s almost time for pie. Almost.
I mean, do you see this beautiful thing? Is it brunch food? Is it dessert? I don’t know. I don’t make the rules. I just make the pastry.
And oh, is this a good one. Pear Pastry Braid is super buttery and filled with tender pears that have been tossed with ginger, lemon, and a few tablespoons of sugar. Yum!
Don’t let these glamour shots deceive you–it’s surprisingly easy to make. Simply roll out a sheet of rough puff pastry (or the frozen thawed all-butter stuff), make a bunch of diagonal cuts down both long sides and fill the center with sliced pear filling.
Alternating sides, carefully cover the filling with overlapping strips of dough, producing a braid-like appearance. Give it a brush of egg wash and a sprinkle of sugar, and then let it bake til golden.
Sounds like a lot, but the time from when you start peeling pears to when you pull the finished pastry out of the oven is less than an hour. It can be sliced and served warm too, meaning that you don’t have to plan crazy far in advance (especially if you already have the pastry dough in the fridge). There’s so much planning around food this time of year that it’s kind of nice to have something you can make when the mood strikes or when someone says they’re going to pop by.
You know what else is nice? Eating a slice of sweet, flaky Pear Pastry Braid in your pajamas on a Saturday morning. Or a Saturday night. Or both.
On any other day, I would probably go on and on about how how I prefer my chocolate desserts to be all chocolate and my fruit desserts to be just fruit, but for right now, I must say otherwise. And even if I were feeling that way this particular Wednesday, I’d be hard-pressed to get the words out, what with shoveling bites of warm Pear Crisp with Chocolate & Ginger into my face.
As far as late-January desserts go, this is about as good as it gets. I mean, when it comes to warm, soft pieces of pear, bits of melty chocolate and crunchy oat topping with two kinds of ginger, what’s not to love?!
Beyond being delicious, this crisp is wonderfully easy to make. If you are at all intimidated by making pie from scratch, this is the dessert for you. There’s no finicky dough or chilling or crimping, and definitely no lengthy cooling time. In fact, the whole process of making a crisp takes one hour, as opposed to the three or four (or more!) that it takes to make and cool a fruit pie.
To start, pears are peeled, diced, and tossed with sugar, cornstarch, ground ginger, and lemon.
Chocolate chips are scattered over the top.
The crisp topping is made from oats, flour, light brown sugar, chopped almonds, and both ground and candied ginger. Oh, and butter.
Scatter the topping over the fruit, being careful to cover most of the chocolate. This will keep it from overcooking.
Bake the crisp for half an hour and let it cool for ten minutes.
While it’s warm, scoop it into bowls and top it with vanilla ice cream. The recipe says this addition is only “if desired,” but I like to think of it as mandatory.
Everybody has their holiday mainstay dish. For some it’s tamales, for others, a glazed ham. For me, it’s this Pear & Cranberry Torte. I found the recipe for a simple 
What’s the difference between a torte and a cake? Besides just sounding fancier than regular cake, tortes are made with minimal to no flour, relying on eggs, sugar, and sometimes leaveners to give them structure. I’ve put one other torte recipe on here, my grain-free version of Molly Wizenberg’s 
But back to today’s torte. It’s a buttery, light vanilla-almond cake full of soft pieces of pear and tart whole cranberries–it definitely tastes like the holidays. Where a lot of holiday desserts are time consuming and require ingredients you don’t use for the other 11 months of the year, this one is simple. With the exception of the pear and the cranberries, you probably have all the ingredients in your home right now.
Once baked, Pear & Cranberry Torte has a very rustic appearance. The pieces of pear will buckle into the batter while the cranberries dot the golden brown top crust. The torte may be served warm or at room temperature, and is just as good with whipped cream or a dusting of confectioner’s sugar as it is by its lonesome.
e2 bakes brooklyn 