Felicity Cloake’s perfect apricot galette. Photograph: Robert Billington/The Guardian. Food styling: Johnny Bentham. View image in fullscreen Felicity Cloake’s perfect apricot galette. Photograph: Robert Billington/The Guardian. Food styling: Johnny Bentham. How to cook the perfect ... Dessert How to cook the perfect apricot galette – recipe A free-form fruit tart that’s easy to throw together with whatever seasonal fruit you have to hand
Felicity Cloake Sun 9 Aug 2026 14.00 CEST Last modified on Sun 9 Aug 2026 14.02 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google T he galette takes its name from the pebble it’s said to resemble – as Elizabeth David observes, it takes many forms, all of them round and flat. For me the word conjures the buckwheat pancakes of Brittany while French friends, in a quick straw poll, tend to think first of the frangipane-stuffed puff pastry galette de rois served at Epiphany, with one vote for a buttery Breton biscuit.
Ask the English-language internet, however, and you’ll be served what is more commonly known as a tart(e), more specifically a charmingly rustic, free-form version which doesn’t require a tin. Though Anne Willan references prune and apple three-tier galette pies from the Pyrenees in her 1981 classic French Regional Cooking, and David includes a yeasted version that sounds more like a cobbler in French Provincial Cooking, most fruit galette recipes I find seem to be American. My hunch is that Alice Waters’ tradition of a daily seasonal galette at Chez Panisse may have popularised the name across the pond, but the general idea never needed upselling. As a quick and easy way to turn a punnet of fruit into a dessert, it’s hard to beat, whatever you call it.
There are two popular options here: a rich shortcrust, or a rich rough puff. As Louis Thompson observes in his incredibly comprehensive exploration of the galette on Nicola Lamb’s Kitchen Project Substack, “because you are eating such a small amount of pastry per portion in a galette, it can afford to be richer”. He, like Nicole Rucker , goes for a rough puff, as does Rose Levy Beranbaum , who writes in The Baking Bible that “in recent years, when I bake a pie, the pie crust I always turn to is this one”, which she describes as a “perfect flaky and tender cream-cheese pie crust”.
View image in fullscreen It’s a rough puff pastry for Nicole Rucker’s apricot galette. (All thumbnail images by Felicity Cloake) While Thompson keeps it simple with equal parts of butter and flour, Beranbaum swaps some of the butter for cream cheese and heavy cream. This makes for a softer and slightly more savoury crust next to Thompson’s buttery, shatteringly crisp base, which puts me in mind of the end of a croissant. Rucker opts for a plainer formula of 60% of the flour weight in butter, allowing the filling to shine. Also in the cream cheese, butter and cream camp are Brian Levy , and Helen Goh and Yotam Ottolenghi, whose rich shortcrus t recipe in 2017’s Sweet actually contains more fat than flour, and, probably not coincidentally, proves a tester favourite. Brian Levy ’s softer, crumblier, more pie-dough like version, which contains less butter, is instead enriched with an egg yolk.
All stand up admirably to the task of containing the fruit’s juices without springing a leak, or even a suspicion of sogginess, but as a galette, in my mind at least, should be something one can knock up relatively easily, I’ve decided to opt for a rich, flaky shortcrust rather than anyt…