I’ve baked more galettes than usual in the last few months, and not because I harvested more fruit or went to more parties. What inspired me to create more of these freeform tarts was a new-to-me technique that kept their filling from becoming a runny mess that oozed out the sides of the folded pastry. It even improved the galette made with sturdy pears that I share this week my Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon.

The technique is simple: sprinkle absorptive cornmeal or breadcrumbs over the pastry before you spread out the fruit. The result is marvelous. I first used a cornmeal layer in one of my juiciest galettes, filled with fresh tart cherries and raspberries. In the past, I would pull a pan holding a berry-heavy galette from the oven to find the pasty sitting soggily in a pool of juice, leaving a sunken filling—and quite the mess to clean up. This time, the pan and parchment it rested on were bone dry, and the tart looked beautiful.

Credit goes to Clair Saffitz for this fabulous technique, which I learned from her Plum Galette with Polenta and Pistachios recipe in her Dessert Person cookbook and saw put to good use in recipes for apple and for apricot and strawberry galettes in her latest book, What’s For Dessert. Even her simplest recipes have highly detailed instructions and loads of tricks to improve your dessert making.
Learn to make Fresh Pear, Goat Cheese, and Rosemary Galette