Tuesdays With Dorie: Cheese and Tomato Galette

I was both looking forward to and dreading this recipe. It uses the same dough as the blueberry peach gallette that I made last summer, and if my memory serves correctly, it was not a joy to work with, even though it was delicious.

No matter, I set out to make the dough again. Flour, cornmeal, sugar, salt and cold butter go into a bowl
the butter gets ‘cut’ in (this job is so much easier with a pastry blender than with my warm hands) and an ice water/sour cream mixture gets blended into it to make the dough.
I probably only used 1/2 of the liquid that the recipe called for. I divided the dough in half and put the two disks into the fridge to chill out for about 2 hours.

Meanwhile, I roasted some tomatoes. The recipe simply calls for sliced tomatoes, but I didn’t want my mediocre tomatoes to mess this up, and I knew that roasting them would bring more sweetenss and tomato-flavor to the party. So I sliced them and laid them on a parchment lined sheet pan, and sprinkled them with a bit of magic salt to add a little garlic and herb flavor. I roasted them for about 2 hours at 200 degrees. They came out of the oven perfect, still a little moist, but far from the watery mass that went into the oven.

Once the tomatoes were cool, I rolled out the rounds of dough. and layered on monterey jack cheese, fresh mozzarella and some tomatoes. Then I folded the dough up around everything to make a free-form tart

I’ve got to admit that this process was significantly easier than it was last year when I did this at my parents house. They’ve got a beautiful textured stone countertop. it is lovely to look at, but for rolling out pastry dough….well, you can imagine. My marble counter top did much better, as did a traditional rolling pin.

The tarts came out of the oven smelling wonderful. The dough was crispy….especially on the bottom, and the cheese and tomatoes were delicious.

I ate it with a big salad of mixed greens. A glass of red wine would have been lovely. Dorothy even ate a good portion of this. And if that doesn’t tell you what you need to know about this recipe, then I don’t know what will. It was Good!

I enjoyed the other galette as two lunches later in the week. The book says that its best eaten on the day it is made, but I didn’t really feel like any quality had been lost in the fridge or toaster oven re-heat.

 

Take a look at other tasty examples of this recipe at Tuesdays With Dorie, I’m sure other bakers had a good time baking this one!

Galette Dough
3 Tablespoons sour cream
1/3 cup ice water
1 cup AP flour
1/4 cup yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
7 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pieces

mix sour cream and ice water together in a large measuring cup
mix dry ingredients together and then cut in butter
with a spoon, add water/sour cream until dough is just moist enough to hold together (I only used about 1/2 of the liquid)
divide dough in half and wrap disks in plastic. store in fridge for at least 2 hours.
you can freeze the dough for up to a month. thaw in the fridge overnight

Cheese and Tomato Galette
1/2 recipe galette dough

2 oz Montery Jack Cheese
2 oz Mozzarella (fresh)
1/4 cup basil leaves, torn or cut into chiffonade
2-3 firm but ripe tomatoes, in 1/4 inch slices. I roasted mine

Roll out the dough to about 1/8 inch thick (I roll mine between two sheets of plastic wrap)
place dough on parchment lined baking sheet, and put both cheeses and top with tomatoes. leave about 1 inch empty on the edges
fold up the edges to enclose the filling

bake at 400 for about 40 minutes. until browned and bubbly