Whole Wheat Brown Butter Apple Galette

On some days I eat for comfort and on other days I cook to provide comfort. The embrace of food is real and close. And sometimes it’s okay to walk into its arms for succour. A particularly demanding week and long hours for the family, called for a dose of dolce on the weekend. I had a brown paper bag of beautiful scarlet apples and one of the most delightful apple recipes I’ve come across. Way easier than apple pie, I made a delectable Whole Wheat Brown Butter Apple Galette to lift our tired spirits. 

“What is a galette?”, you ask. Very French and a little rustic albeit in an elegant way, a galette is a free-form tart or shallow pie of shortcrust pastry usually filled with fruit or vegetables and even cheese. It’s like pastry play dough, you can shape it as you want – circles, squares and rectangles are all allowed. The only rule is that the edges are have to be folded in to hold the filling and to prevent any juices from leaking out. Baked on a cookie sheet or baking tray, galettes are unfussy, straightforward, simple and a great last minute option if you’ve had no time to plan. 

 

If you like the flavours of apple pie but like me, but prefer a lighter, crisper version, the galette is for you. This one is a favourite on my list of apple recipes. Inspired from Phyllis Grant’s version on Food 52, mine has a whole wheat crust and blueberry preserve instead of regular flour and apricot glaze respectively. I also cut down on the quantity of cream in the egg wash for the pastry and it turned out just fine. To all those who fear that  a whole wheat crust will be stodgy, I say that this crust will make a believer out of you. It’s crisp and flaky and every bit as good, if not better than regular pastry flour. Whole wheat also makes for a better looking galette, because its nutty colour browns beautifully yielding a warm coffee toned crust.

Apple recipes are more often than not desserts that are eaten warm. They also almost always have cinnamon as a seasoning since apples and cinnamon compliment each other so well. A little different from other apple recipes, this one has vanilla in place of cinnamon. But this small change creates changes the flavour in a big way. Mixed with the brown butter, the vanilla becomes caramelly with a mouth-watering aroma that I wish I could trap in a bottle. It was the smell of warm, cosy love that would spread like liquid toffee inside our stressed bodies with every bite of the galette. The final touch of gloss on the tart was the blueberry glaze. Gently warmed blueberry preserve brushed ever so lightly on the still oven-fresh galette enhanced its darkly attractive sheen making it quite irresistible.

This galette has the homey, handmade look perfect for the family dinner table, and yet it is incredibly elegant. The thin, wafer-like apple slices and the fragrant vanilla brown butter make it delicate and worthy of a dinner party. So, if you have a mandolin, use it on setting number 2 to get translucent discs of apple which absorb all that warm butter and get lightly browned yet soft in the oven. If you don’t own a mandolin, make sure you slice the apples thinly. This is key to achieving the perfect look. We ate the galette plain but a dollop of vanilla ice cream or a glass of dessert wine would partner beautifully.

The next time your hue is blue, and your tongue begs a wisp of sugar, and you are rifling through your apple recipes looking for a pie, try a Whole Wheat Brown Butter Galette for sweet solace.