We started pastry today, focusing on making pastry crusts. In a few days, we will have a pastry cook tech exam in which we will have to make an apple galette. An apple galette is a free-form apple tart, traditionally served in France as a rustic, winter dessert.
We began day 1 of pastries with a demo of 3 different crusts - a traditional butter crust, a vegan pastry crust with coconut oil, and a savory olive oil crust. Surprisingly, my favorite was the olive oil crust, the vegan crust came in second, and the butter trailed in as last place! I guess the Paula Deen can't win every time...
I'm going to use the olive oil crust to make an appetizer for Thanksgiving - goat cheese, caramelized onion, and fig tart with an olive oil crust.
To make a vegan pastry crust, we mixed all-purpose flour with whole wheat pastry flour. As with cakes, the integrity of the crust all depends on how we treat the gluten. In pastry crusts, one does not want to develop the gluten hardly at all. This is why we work with extremely cold ingredients (the cold retards the development of gluten), as well as why one "cuts" in the fat to the flour, to coat the flour with fat so that when mixed with liquid, the water won't activate the gluten. Very scientific if you ask me...
Vegan pastry crust:
3/4 cup AP flour
3/4 cup WW pastry flour
1/3 cup coconut oil
2 tablespoons maple crystals
dash of salt
dash of cinnamon
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1 tablespoon vanilla
ice cold water
"Treat the dough as an acquaintance, not a close friend" quoted Chef Cheryl, as she explained to us the technique for making the crust. This makes perfect sense to me, because the way that I interact with an new acquaintance would be gingerly, timidly, with care not to disrupt or agitate at all. I think this is the exact way to properly handle a pastry dough.
After rolling the crust, I piled sauteed apples on top of a bread crumb and maple mixture into the center of the circular crust.
I then took a knife and cut 8 flaps into the dough and gently folded the strips up and around the apples, closing in and containing all of the cinnamon, maple and tart flavors of the filling.
Adding a small bit of decor and brushing with maple syrup, the apple galette went straight into the oven to bakeAfter 40 or so minutes, it came out beautifully browned and crisp on the outside, bubbling and oozing on the inside.
Each of my classmates also made an apple galette, and sticking with tradition, we had a tasting at the end of class. Each person started with the same recipe and followed it to the best of their ability... but each galette turned out slightly different - the texture of the apples, the thickness of the crust, the chewiness of the crust, the sweetness, the tartness, SO many things could be different...
I think, though, that these are one of the best desserts I have ever had. Apples, cinnamon, maple, flour - the best, most comforting combination in the whole world. The only thing that the galette was lacking was a big scoop of creamy vanilla ice cream.
16 apple galettes later and I still LOVED them...
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