A sweet and tangy peach galette made with sour cream pastry and bright lemon notes – a perfectly rustic and free-form dessert for any time you have fresh peaches.
End-of-season peaches are the best. They’re extra juicy and so, so sweet. Eating them as the weather changes around you lets you hold on to summer for just that little bit longer.
I didn’t always love peaches. As a kid, I hated the texture of the skin and the fuzzy feeling of it on my face. Until my older sister cut one up into wedges for me like it was the simplest solution in the world. And it was!
As fresh tasting and sweet smelling as ripe peaches are in their own right, they are one of the best summer stone fruit to cook with. Sunny peach jams and relishes, vanilla tea cakes with the peaches baked right in, decadent crumbles and cobblers, bubbling hot and with a scoop of ice cream… the list goes on.
But I love late-season peaches best in a galette – wrapped up in pastry with just a bit of lemon to brighten everything up.
How-To Video:
What is a Galette?
Galette is the traditional French term for anything that is flat and round, and can be made from pastry or bread. This means that a galette can equally be a galette de Rois (king cake), a pithivier (essentially enclosed flat pies), a buckwheat galette (savoury folded crepe from Breton), or a brioche galette.
Today, the most common interpretation of galette is a free-form, rustic tart with fruit spilling out from the partly folded crust. Though the ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ type of cooking has made savoury galettes quite popular as well.
Being easier to make that pies or tarts is another reason galettes have become so popular. You don’t need any fancy pie dishes or tart pans to make a galette; just roll it out, pile on the filling, fold and tuck up the edges, place it onto a baking tray and bake!
No Soggy Bottoms Here!
Galettes can be made with most kinds of pie dough, but there’s something about a tender, flaky and slightly tart sour cream dough that makes it a perfect pairing to fruit fillings. It’s forgiving, but it is a softer dough from the extra fat content in the sour cream, which we’re using as the liquid to bind the dough. It’s a versatile dough that works equally well with both sweet and savoury flavours.
Sour cream pastry can soften quite quickly if you over handle it or your kitchen is hot. But using baking paper and chilling it whenever you need to makes it a great pastry for galettes. Chilling the pastry also helps guard against the dreaded soggy bottom! Other little tricks to safeguard your pastry bottom include:
- Even pastry: the sour cream pastry, or any pastry used to make a galette, should be even all around for even cooking, and should be rolled out quite thinly, around 5mm. Too thick and the pastry will be gummy instead of flaky, and if it’s too thin, it will start to burn before the filling has cooked.
- Too much liquid: galette fillings should not be too wet as galette dough isn’t par-baked. For this filling, I add a little corn flour to thicken up the extra lemon juice I add for flavour. The amount of liquid produced by the filling will also depend on the ripeness and water content of your peaches. Just add a couple of tablespoons of the filling liquid to the galette and discard the rest.
- An extra layer: because galettes aren’t par-baked, recipes usually call for an extra layer or barrier between the pastry and the filling. For this combo, and because I love the brightness that lemon brings to pastry desserts, I’ve used lemon curd. But you can equally use a layer of frangipane, egg whites, a jam wash, semolina flour or even biscuits or cookies crumbs.
Love stone fruit? Here are some other summer fruit recipes:
- Tomato, Peach and Burrata Salad
- Ricotta and Rosemary Pancakes
- Prawn-Stuffed Avocados with Finger Limes
- Plum and Salmon Salad
Peach Galette with Sour Cream Pastry
Ingredients
For the Sour Cream Pastry
- 250 g all-purpose flour
- 190 g unsalted butter, cubed and chilled
- 2 teaspoons sugar
- Pinch of salt
- Zest from 1 lemon
- 125 ml full-fat sour cream
For the Peach Filling
- 4 peaches
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
- 1 tablespoon corn flour
- 1 tablespoon fresh lemon thyme or thyme, optional but recommended
- 2 tablespoons lemon curd , plus 1 teaspoon extra
- 1 egg
- Demerara sugar to sprinkle
- Vanilla ice cream to serve, optional
Instructions
- Start by making the sour cream pastry. To a food processor, add the flour and butter and pulse until fine crumbs form. Add the sugar, salt, lemon zest and sour cream, and pulse in short bursts until the dough comes together in little pebbles.
- Turn the dough out onto a work surface and gently knead and pat until it comes together (see notes). Pat it into a flat rectangular parcel, cover in cling wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
- While the pastry is chilling, make the filling. Start by slicing the peaches into thin wedges. You want the peaches to be sliced thinly so that they bake at the same time as the crust; if they’re too thick, the pastry will be golden brown before the fruit has had a chance to soften and cook.
- Combine the peaches with the sugar, lemon juice, corn flour (see notes) and lemon thyme or thyme, if using and mix well. Set aside.
- Arrange the oven racks so you can use the middle one, and preheat the oven to 200°C. Place the empty baking tray you’ll be using to bake the galette on into the over to preheat.
- Remove the pastry from the fridge and unwrap the top of it, keeping it over one side. Turn it, top down, onto some baking paper. Roll out the sour cream pastry between the cling film and the baking paper to an even, 5mm thickness. Remove the cling film but keep the pastry on the baking paper.
- Spoon the lemon curd into the centre of the pastry and spread it around in a thin, even layer, making sure to keep a 5cm border around the edge. Add the peach filling and just a couple of tablespoons of any leftover juice (see note) on top of the lemon curd, still keeping that outer border.
- Using the baking paper to help if needed, fold the edges of the pastry up and over the filling, overlapping and pleating the folds as you go around the galette. Gently tuck any peaches that may have escaped back into the pastry.
- Whisk the egg with 1 tablespoon of water and brush the egg wash all over the folded parts of the pastry. Then sprinkle with demerara sugar.
- Remove the baking tray from the oven and slide the parchment paper and galette onto the tray and return it to the oven. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, or until the pastry is golden brown and cooked through and the peach filling is soft and bubbling.
- Transfer the galette, still on the parchment paper, to a wire rack. Mix the extra teaspoon of lemon curd with a splash of water and then brush this all over the peaches for extra flavour and shine.
- Allow the galette to cool to warm before serving with some ice cream.
Cook along with me
Notes
- It helps to knead the sour cream pastry dough on a wooden board, or pastry slab, if you have one. If not, have a little bit of flour on hand to very lightly flour the work surface.
- If you notice the pastry melting as you knead it, place it in the fridge for 5 minutes and then continue kneading and patting it together.
- If you don’t have or don’t want to use corn flour, a little all-purpose flour can be substituted. Or you could even omit the lemon juice and flour completely if your peaches aren’t super juicy.
- The amount of liquid the peaches will release when you make the filling is dependent on how ripe or watery they are. So when you add the peach filling to the sour cream pasty, don’t add more than a couple of tablespoons of liquid. This will ensure that you don’t end up with a soggy bottom galette!
4 Comments
I think peaches are having a great season this year, so this elegant dessert is perfect, and looks delicious!
They really are delicious! Even better when encased in pastry, too
My stomach actually growled after reading your recipe. Thank you for the pastry tips and thank you for bringing it to FF.
I hope you get to make it soon!