Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Peaches and Pâte Brisée


Alas, it's the time of year that I've been dreading. Today was the first official day of rain in SoCal. Summer is almost out the door, it's time to say my goodbyes to the gorgeous sunny days. I'll be slaving away over papers, presentations, and exhibition plans this winter. -sigh-

Food blogs all over the web have began posting winter recipes with pumpkin and cranberries. Soups, stews, and warm cobblers are popping up everywhere. I'm having a hard time saying my goodbyes to summer even though I'm craving the goodness of Thanksgiving.

I haven't started baking fall goodies yet, so here's a post about peaches and crusts; or the last bit of summer. My mom bought these peaches from the grocery store, so they were kind of hit or miss. After having organic, locally grown peaches, these just didn't compare! If you can, always try to get your hands on good locally grown peaches instead of what the market usually carries. Go to your Farmer's Markets people!! The produce is waaaay better...even if it might cost a little bit more, it's definitely worth it.


I decided to make both a galette and hand pies. I tried two different crust recipes. The galette was adapted from Smitten Kitchen's Nectarine Galette. I don't know if it was because of this recipe or me learning to handle dough better, but this was one of the flakiest crusts I have ever made. It was beautiful!! And really simple: flour, sugar, salt, butter, water. The filling consisted of peaches, ground almonds, flour, and sugar. The sprinkling off granulated sugar before baking made a beautiful crust. I would probably cut the sugar out of the dough recipe next time though, there was plenty of sugar to be had in the filling and the final sprinkling.


The second crust recipe consisted of the same ingredients, minus the sugar. But it was put together in a whole different way from Tartine, that I found through Croissants for Breakfast. The method goes somewhere along the lines of rolling out all the ingredients on a flat surface. At first it seems like a rather strange, messy idea, but the crust came out pretty flaky, just not the same kind of flakiness as the galette. I also decided to sprinkle these with some turbinado sugar, which didn't do much to the appearance, I should have used a better glaze and perhaps regular granulated sugar.