Galette Dough

I forgot to give credit where credit is due. The leek and goat cheese galette and the dough come from none other than Deborah Madison, my favorite chef, and her cook book, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. I ADORE this book. It has the best recipes and everything tastes amazing. This dough recipe is no exception.

This recipe is easy and the results are nothing short of amazing. The crust is flaky, buttery, light.....

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Ingredients
-2 cups all-purpose flour or whole-wheat pastry flour (I used all purpose)
- 1/2 tsp salt
-1 tablespoon sugar (for savory galette, I used 1 tsp)
-12 tablespoons cold, unsalted butter
-1/3 to 1/2 cup ice water as needed

Preparation
Mix the flour, salt, and sugar together in the a bowl. I'm kind of stickler for keeping things cold, so I put the dry ingredients in the fridge for 30 minutes before using. Cut in the butter by hand or with a food processor, leaving some pea-sized chunks. I place the butter in the freezer for 10 minutes to make it really cold and firm. Sprinkle the ice water over the top by the tablespoon and toss it with the flour mixture until you can bring the dough together into a a ball. Once again, I found that I needed more water than the recipe called for, say about 3/4 cups.

Press it into a disk and refrigerate for 15 minutes if the butter feels soft. I refrigerated for 2 hours because I really don't want the butter to melt.

The key to flaky pastry is making sure there are chunks for butter in the dough so be careful not to over process if you're using a food processor. I find that 7 1-second pulses is just about right. Don't get too concerned about the number of pulses. Just take a look at it to see what size the butter chunks are. If they're pea sized, you're golden.

Deborah does not use the parchment paper method -- she just flours the surface of the counter. I think it could probably work but I used the parchment paper method, but only one piece so that I could bake the galette on the parchment. Roll out the dough on parchment and lightly flour the rolling pin and the top of the dough. You shouldn't have any sticking issues.

If you don't use parchment, flour the counter and roll dough into 14 inch irregular circle about 1/8 inch thick. Fold into quarters and transfer it to the back of a sheet pan or a cookie sheet without sides. Unfold it. It will be larger than the pan until you fold the edges over the filling.

So simple. Your friends will be impressed.