Strawberries have pretty much wound down for the season but fortunately that means it's time for blueberries. It's a little bit early in the season around here, but our local blueberry farm was teeming with ripe berries on many of their bushes. The big fat ones were less abundant, but they had plenty of the smaller variety. Last year we picked about 16 pounds in two trips. This year we took DH along and he had a 5 gallon bucket. Apparently he felt he needed to try and fill this 5 gallon bucket - by the time I convinced him that we had enough, we were up to 23 pounds of blueberries!
Needless to say, it's been blueberry week at our house. So far we have made a couple of favorites from last year - Blueberry Buckle Coffeecake and Blueberry Ice Cream. This time the blueberry ice cream was even more luscious since I was able to use local eggs and rich cream from a local dairy farm - yum.
We've also tried two new recipes...one for a blueberry banana muffin that I'll share later and one for this fabulous Blueberry Galette. While searching for a recipe, I discovered that there are many incarnations of a galette, some using a puff pastry crust, some using a yeasted dough, but to me, a galette has always been basically a free-form pie. I have always been attracted to the rustic look of a galette - it just seemed much less intimidating and fussy than a more structured pie.
The crust went together very easily - just a few pulses of all your ingredients in the food processor and then the addition of the cream and ice water until the dough begins to come together and you're done. The dough gets a 2 hour chill (or can be done the day before) before getting rolled out into a 12-inch circle. The dough was quite easy to work with and was not overly sticky.
Next, a mixture of blueberries and sugar is piled in the middle of the dough, leaving a 2-3 inch border. The blueberries get topped with bits of butter and then the dough is folded up around them - very, very simple to do. A quick brushing of cream and sprinkling of sugar and it's ready to hit the oven.
The crust ended up being delicious - flaky and slightly sweet, with just a little extra texture from the cornmeal without feeling unpleasantly grainy as I feared might be the case. The sprinkling of sugar also gives an added crunch as well as nice sparkle. The filling only oozed a tiny bit in one spot where the crust must have been rolled a bit too thin and was not at all runny when we cut the galette to serve - unlike many of the berry pies I've tried in the past. We topped the galette off with a bit of homemade whipped cream using luscious, rich cream from a local dairy as an added treat.
This is my first time making a galette, but I can assure you it won't be my last. Very simple and unfussy, yet it looks elegant and tastes delicious. What's not to like?
