Apricot Galette

Before I launch into the is recipe, a note on puff pastry. Puff pastry done well is a thing of beauty. The pastry is built of delicate layers of dough and butter, which expand when cooked to give a flaky, crisp texture.

The only problem is, making puff pastry from scratch is a long, long process. You need to be very patient. If you do not chill the pastry for long enough, the butter will ooze out and before you know what's happening, there's butter everywhere and the pastry is not salvageable.

You don't want that, do you? So the key is to keep the ingredients as cold as possible and work quickly whenever it's out of the fridge.

If you do notice the butter oozing out of the pastry, pop it back in the fridge and chill it a bit longer.

Of course, any sane person would avoid all this bother by buying pre-made pastry. You can get perfectly good pastry, ready to use, in any large supermarket.

But I never claimed I was sane.

So feel free to use ready made pastry in this recipe. If you have a spare day and a burning desire to make puff pastry, then I used Paul Hollywood's method, which can be found here.

But to return to the apricot galette. I made it to a Yottam Ottolenghi recipe. It was supposed to feature rosemary sprigs, but the supermarket didn't have any, so my galette was unadorned.

Ottolenghi reckoned you could get two galettes from 375g pastry. I found this not to be the case. When I tried to stretch the pastry that far it got too thin and I had to do some emergency repair work.

So I have adjusted the quantities in the recipe to take account of this and it now makes only one galette, which will serve four (greedy) people or six to eight with smaller appetites.

You will need:

375g puff pastry dough (rolled into a 19cm x 25cm rectangle)
40g ground almonds
35g light brown soft sugar, plus 1 tsp to sprinkle
grated zest of 1 lemon
1 whisked egg
2 tins apricot halves (480g drained weight)
25g unsalted butter, melted
1/4 tsp almond extract
25g smooth apricot jam

1. Mix together the ground almonds, sugar and lemon and sprinkle over the dough, leaving a border of 2-3cm.

2. Arrange the apricots cut side up on top of the almond mix, overlapping them slightly. Brush the empty pastry with the whisked egg.

3. Crimp the edges of the tarts by pulling the edges in, holding your thumb and index finger close together in a pinching motion on the outside edge of the pastry and pushing on the other side with your index finger. Brush with more egg wash.

4. Mix the melted butter and almond extract and brush generously over the apricots. Sprinkle the remaining sugar over the galette, cover it with cling film and chill in the fridge for 20 minutes.

5. Preheat the oven to 190C. Bake the galette for 40 minutes until the pastry is golden brown, then leave to cool. Heat the apricot jam with 1 tsp cold water (30 seconds in the microwave should do it). Brush it over the galette.

You can serve warm, with a bit of cream, or the next day.

Happy Baking!

Ellie
xxx