Galette Dough and Cheese and Sausage Galette

My mom sent me this recipe from her Baking with Julia book awhile ago and dang, I wish I had done it sooner. It was such a snap to put together and so tasty. Aaron and I had a savory one for dinner and there’s a sweet one baking in the oven right now that I’ll post about later. This can be done in a food processor or by hand. Since my food processor is itty bitty, I did it by hand. As with all recipes from my mom, her notes are scattered throughout.

Galette Dough from Baking with Julia via my mom:

Makes enough for two 8-inch galettes

3 Tb. sour cream (or yogurt or buttermilk. I used sour cream because for once I had some in the house.)
1/3 c. approximately ice water
1 c. unbleached white flour
¼ c. cornmeal
1 tsp. sugar
½ tsp. salt
7 Tb. cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

Sit in sour cream and 1/3 c. ice water together in a small bowl and set aside. Mom note – place in freezer along with your cut up butter while you get the flour thing going – it is important that these ingredients remain cold before adding. Okay back to the recipe.



Put flour, cornmeal, sugar, and salt in a large bowl and stir with a fork to mix. Drop butter piece into bowl, tossing them once or twice to coat them with flour. With a pastry blender (I used my fingers, as always), work the butter into the flour, aiming for piece of butter that range from bread crumb to small peas. The smaller pieces will make the dough tender, the large ones will make it flaky. Mom note – aim for a smaller crumb size – you will be happier when it comes time to roll it out later.

Sprinkle the cold sour cream mixture over the dough one tablespoon at a time, tossing with a fork to evenly distribute it. After you’ve added all of the sour cream, the dough should be moist enough to stick together when pressed; if it is not, add additional cold water, one teaspoon at a time. With your hands, gather curds of dough together. You’ll have a soft, malleable dough, the kind you might want to overwork. Mom note – do not as this dough comes together quite easily.



Turn the dough out of the bowl and divide in half. Press each piece of dough into a disk, wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least 2 hours. The dough can be kept in the refrigerator for a day or two, or it can be wrapped airtight and frozen for a month. Thaw, still wrapped, in the refrigerator. It is convenient to roll the dough into rounds, place parchment between each round and freeze them wrapped in plastic; this way you’ll need only about 20 minutes to defrost at room temperature before it can be filled, folded into a galette and baked.

I modified the Cheese and Tomato Galette from the same set of recipes my mom set for the following savory galette. It was so tasty and I wish I had more to eat right now. Yum, yum, yum.

Here’s what I did for a Cheese and Sausage Galette:

½ recipe galette dough, chilled
2 oz. Monterey jack cheese, shredded
2 oz. fresh mozzarella cheese, cut into chunks
½ c. yellow onion, sliced
2 Andouille chicken sausages, sliced (yay TJ’s!)
Olive oil

Heat a small saucepan over medium heat with a small amount of olive oil. Toss onions in oil and cook until soft and golden brown, about 8 minutes. Set aside.

Position a rack in the lower third of the oven and heat the oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Put the dough on a lightly floured surface and roll it into an 11-inch circle that’s about 1/8 inch thick. Since the dough is soft, you’ll need to lift it now and then and toss some flour under it and over the top. Roll the dough up around your rolling pin and unroll onto a prepared baking sheet. I missed this step here and prepared mine on the counter and then had to move it. As a result, it looked much nicer on the counter. Oh well. It still turned out fine.



Mix cheeses and scatter over rolled-out dough, leaving a 2”-3” border. Scatter the onions over the cheese. Place the sliced sausage in concentric circles, one slice slightly overlapping the last, on top of the cheese and onion. Fold the uncovered border of dough up over the filling, allowing the dough to pleat as you lift it up and work your way around the galette.



(PS: Thanks Blogspot for turning this one sideways! You're a pal!)

Bake the galette for 35-40 minutes (35 was just about perfect for me, but you may want to start checking on it at 30), or until the pastry is golden and crisp and the cheese is bubbly. Transfer the baking sheet to a cooling rack and let the galette rest on the sheet for 15 minutes. Mom note – Slip a wide spatula or two smaller ones under the galette and gently place on your serving plate. Do this with careful determination. The galette will easily peel away from the parchment paper.



Serve warm or at room temperature.

The galette can be kept at room temperature for several hours and is best serve the day it is made.

We had ours with some mixed greens. It was such a tasty meal! The dough is crispy and light and just has a really, really good taste. Aaron compared the flavor to the crispy part of a croissant, which I think is a very apt description. I will most certainly be making the dough again and will try different types of savory galettes. It’s just so adaptable and wonderful.