Fight Fruit Waste With This Easy-as-pie Galette Recipe

If you are faced with a glut of overripe fruit, you can fight food waste by turning it into a French-inspired pastry, known as a galette. This dish is easier to make than you think because a galette is a free-form pastry, filled with fruit, and baked on a baking sheet.

In South Africa and across the world, food is treated as a disposable commodity. A staggering third of our food produced for human consumption globally is wasted. Locally, this accounts for 10-million tons of food a year across the entire value chain, from farm to table with a value of R61.5 billion.

The resources spent on food waste is not just the actual food alone. Water accounts for a large part of food production and the water wasted from this would fill more than 600 000 Olympic sized swimming pools, this is particularly concerning coming from a water-scarce country. The equivalent in wasted electricity could power the City of Johannesburg for roughly 16 weeks.

How to use your overripe fruit

Over the past few months of lockdown, we might have fallen into the trap of buying too many perishable foods during trips to the grocery store, leading to that mouldy peach we try to ignore for a bit too long. With more time at home, there has been a worldwide trend in which brown bananas are ending up in a banana bread instead of seeing the inside of a Tuffy’s bag. But surely there is more variety than this!

Soft fruits like peaches, pears and strawberries are regular suspects in the overripe fruit bowl and so I’ve found that a quick and easy way to use them is to put them into a light and flaky galette. Soft, overripe fruit is best for this recipe because of its higher sugar content and just about any fruit would do.

Lockdown has made me discover that a homemade pastry is much easier than I thought, and after making it a few times, I don’t ever want to go to the store-bought version, what’s more, you probably have all the ingredients already!

Galette Recipe

5 from 2 votes

Recipe by Azraa Rawoot Course: DessertCuisine: FrenchDifficulty: Medium

Prep time

30

minutes

Cooking time

45

minutes

Total time

1

hour 

15

minutes

Using a simple fruit filling and homemade pastry, you can create a delicious dessert.

Ingredients – PASTRY

• 60 grams 60 all-purpose flour, plus some extra for rolling out the dough (1/2 cup)

• 60 grams 60 wholewheat flour (1/2 cup)

• 2 tablespoons 2 granulated sugar

• 1/2 teaspoon 1/2 salt

• 100 grams 100 unsalted butter, cold, cut into small cubes

• ice cold water, as needed

• INGREDIENTS – FILLING

• 1 pear, cored, and thinly sliced into half-moons

• 2 peaches or nectarines, de-pitted, and thinly sliced into half-moons

• 3 tablespoons 3 brown sugar

• 1/2 teaspoon 1/2 vanilla extract

• 1 tablespoon 1 lemon juice with grated rind

• 1 teaspoon 1 balsamic vinegar

• 1 egg

• Greek yoghurt or whipped cream with cinnamon for serving

Method

• Make the pastry by adding the flours, sugar, salt and butter into a food processor with the mixing attachment and lightly pulse until you have a thick coarse sandy mixture, but still able to see pea-sized butter chunks throughout. This can be done by hand in a mixing bowl if you do not have a food processor.
• Slowly add up to 2 tablespoons of ice water until the dough comes together. Do not overwork the pastry.
• Tumble the dough out of the food processor and work into a ball. Wrap the dough up in a piece of baking paper or cling wrap and let it rest in the fridge for 30 – 120 minutes.
• To assemble the filling, gently combine the sliced fruits with the brown sugar, vanilla, lemon juice and rind, and balsamic vinegar. Let this rest for about 30 minutes before baking. The sugar will extract any additional liquid that would make the pastry soggy.
• Dust the surface of a piece of baking paper with flour and roll out your dough into a rough circle. About 3 mm thick and 30 cm wide. Leaving behind the fruit juices (save this for serving), place the peaches and pears in the centre, shingling them one over the other to create a fish-scale type pattern. Leave a 3-5 cm border of pastry at the edge.
• Fold over the edges of the dough and ensure that the seams are pressed together to prevent the fruit juices from flowing out whilst baking. Brush the pastry with an egg wash (heavy cream works just as well) and finish by sprinkling a small amount of brown sugar on top.
• Bake for 40-45 minutes at 200℃, until the crust has a golden brown hue. I find that the pastry should be rotated halfway through to ensure all sides are evenly browned.
• Remove from the oven and serve with whipped cream or Greek yoghurt with cinnamon sprinkled on top, and spoon over the leftover sugared fruit juices. Allowing the galette to cool slightly will thicken up the juices inside, but I like to tuck in as soon as it comes out of the oven!

Did you make this recipe?

Tag @the.south.african on Instagram and hashtag it #recipes

Like this recipe?

Follow us @thesouthafrican on Pinterest