Galettes Are the Lazy Pies You're Looking For

When you have a lot of nice fruit, but you aren't, say, casually eating a bowl of strawberries as a snack every day, there's a sense of urgency every time you open the fridge. Fruit has diminishing returns after a certain stage. Particularly when your berries or apples or peaches are obtained at the height of the season, and there are a lot of them, and maybe you've already tried the obvious things to do with Too Much Fruit, like piling it on yogurt and making jam. Here is your easy solution: Make yourself a galette.

A galette, if you've never made one, is in the same family as a pie and pretty much the same as a crostada. It's basically a pie for when you can't be bothered with the fussiness of pie, a pie for when you just want to pile a bunch of things into dough, crimp the dough around it, and throw it in the oven. It's a pie that requires no pie dish, just a sheet pan, and you can put pretty much any fruit or vegetable you want in there. I mean I've never tried watermelon or brussel sprouts, but there are no rules here except making things you want to eat.

The rules of a galette are simple. First, you make pie dough in your preferred method, with flour and shortening or butter and water. Don't freak out too much about this—pie dough gets a bad rap, but you can figure it out pretty quickly. And honestly if you just want to keep some premade frozen pie dough on hand for when you're in a galette mood, I will applaud your foresight. I'm not the freezer police.

Whatever your dough situation, all you need to do is roll it into a rough circle-ish shape that leaves room for your to fold the edges over the filling. Want to make a square? I'm not going to stop you! A triangle? Why not! Point is, it doesn't need to be perfectly round or square or angular for it to work. You'll want to cut your fruit into pieces that are reasonably bite-sized and mix it with a little cornstarch and sugar, if sweet is what you're going for. There are all kinds of variations on this, like this Apple Galette recipe that breaks down the apples before you add them to the dough, or this Plum Galette that uses plum jam, too, but that's the basic order of operations. You can add spices if you want, or a squeeze of lemon juice. Life is a rich tapestry. Bake it at 425 degrees until the crust is nice and golden brown and the fruit has broken down into a delicious pie filling consistency. Then you eat it.

There's no reason it has to be sweet, either. You can make a savory galette just as easily, like this one that pairs Roquefort cheese with pears and caremlized onions or this one that uses artichokes, shallots, and radishes as the filling. Once you get the hang of the galette process, you can start throwing in whatever makes sense to you. Galettes are great, and you'll be glad you added them to your repertoire.