Week 9: Leek and Ham Galette

The book: Good Housekeeping Easy To Make Complete Cookbook

The recipe: p244, "Leek and Ham Galette"

I'm happy to buy every ingredient required for this project, but I draw the line at an entirely new freezer. We'll come to that, though.

A fundamental problem with the Random Kitchen concept is the risk of repetition, and right from the moment this recipe pops out of the hat, it looks suspiciously like the bastard offspring of my recent adventures in Italian asparagus and Delia's superfluous shortcuts. Looking through this section of the Good Housekeeping Easy To Make Complete Cookbook, however, it's not hard to see why: it's positively overflowing with sausage rolls, pies, quiches, filo parcels, tarts, tartlets, spanakopita, pithiviers and more besides. No wonder this kind of thing seems to be turning up with some regularity!

In this case, a "galette" is the order of the day. Not knowing what one of those is when it's à la maison, I consult Wikipedia, which explains that it's a term "used in French cuisine to designate various types of flat round or freeform crusty cakes". The photo accompanying the recipe makes this particular galette look more like a glorified Greggs Steak Bake than anything else - but as a Gosforth boy, I naturally consider that particular establishment to be one of this nation's crowning achievements, so I'm not complaining.

The mother lode

Plus it's a good opportunity to dive into the pages of this book, a Christmas gift designed to inspire Sam to do more cooking, but which even I have left largely untouched to date. So let's see where this stab at Franco-Geordie fusion leads us.

The prep: This is going to be exciting: while I haven't yet been called upon to make my own pastry, this recipe at least requires rolling out a block to the desired thinness instead of relying on a Jus-Rol sheet, so there's all sorts of potential for disaster there.

I take the liberty of using dried marjoram instead of fresh, mainly because Lewisham Sainsbury's doesn't stock the latter and I'd be surprised if it ever has. We're back to our good old friend Gruyère, this time as the cheese of choice rather than a (literally) pale substitute, and I shell out for a reasonably decent cooked ham to be "thickly shredded" into the mix. Otherwise, this is a mercifully straightforward bit of winter fare on the shopping front. 

Exceeeeept... the recipe calls for the galette to be frozen for a while. And the galette has a base footprint of 15 x 30.5cm. Our freezer is by no means small, but the drawers don't go back particularly far - and on a baking tray substantial enough to house it with room to spare, the pastry product as described would quite simply not fit in there. Bah, bah and thrice bah.

My only-child instinct is to abandon the whole project and go and sit in a corner and eat ham and Gruyère with my bare hands, but Sam comes up with the slightly more rational idea of just making two smaller galettes in a freezer-friendly size.

OK, fine, I suppose that could work.

The making: The "Easy To Make" part of the cookbook's name appears to be predicated upon its recipes consisting of very few steps. The Leek and Ham Galette, for example, involves a mere three. Three! Except on closer inspection it turns out that each "step" is a dense paragraph consisting of a good half-dozen separate and unrelated instructions. THAT IS DEFINITELY CHEATING.

Anyway, the first paragraph step requires me to preheat the oven to 220°C (remember this bit, it'll be important) then grease a baking sheet. Scarred by past experience of occasional (i.e. near-constant) tray-destroying stickage and resulting unsatisfactory food presentation, I opt for baking paper instead. The leeks are then chopped, boiled for a few minutes, and drained. The cooking water is retained, while the leeks are plunged into cold water then left to drain again.

Next I'm required to make a roux. I'm increasingly convinced that the roux is the practical joke of the recipe world. Every time I'm told the process will "form a smooth paste", and every time I'm left with something that looks like lumpy apple crumble topping. Still, adding the leek water and milk then slowly heating and whisking ends up removing the most egregious lumps and bumps, so that's something. After simmering briefly, the ensuing sauce is taken off the heat and left for 20 minutes to thicken and cool, before the marjoram, leeks, shredded ham and cubed Gruyère are stirred through to make what will be the heroic filling of today's masterpiece.

I then roll out the pastry on a lightly floured surface in an attempt to create a "30.5 x 33cm rectangle". Yeah, good luck with that. Having been removed from the fridge a while ago to reach peak malleability, the pastry is already so malleable it's threatening to become unworkable, so any pretence of straight edges is abandoned and I have to satisfy myself with what looks like the rough outline of various US states instead.

Washington and Oregon, accompanied by a rogue Minnesota

The big pastry "rectangle" is split and then (for the purposes of my improvised mini-galettes) split again. The two smaller pastry "rectangles" are placed onto the freezer-sized baking trays, the filling is spooned inelegantly into the middle, the edges are brushed with beaten egg, and the slightly larger pastry "rectangles" are placed on top.

Next the recipe wants me to press and crimp the edges. I know what crimping is but I don't really know what it entails. "Bashing the thing for a while with the butt of a knife" seems to achieve the desired effect, anyway. And then the two galettes are put in the freezer "for 20 minutes or until firm", before being brushed with beaten egg, sprinkled with some more Gruyère (an innovation the otherwise unimpeachable Greggs should seriously consider), and finally baked in the oven for 20-30 minutes until suitably nice and crisp and pasty-y.

Remember when I mentioned pre-heating the oven? Yeah. Good thing I looked ahead and ignored that bit. If you followed the recipe to the letter, your oven would have been merrily ticking over at 220°C for AT LEAST 45 MINUTES before your galette(s) even reached the baking stage. Either the folks at Good Housekeeping are too cheap to employ proofreaders or they really, really hate the environment.

The eating: I should mention at this point that the mega-galette required by the recipe apparently "serves 4". That claim always tends to prompt a "yeah, right" response in this household, but all the more so when circumstances have dictated that what comes out of the oven are two pretty massive, slightly misshapen, but very inviting Steak-Bake-a-likes:

1+1=2

We're blatantly having one each, aren't we? Yes, yes we are. And the misshapenness - slightly smoothed by the baking process anyway - only adds to the appeal, if I'm being honest. Wonky food is honest food, and if you want cookie-cutter perfection, you might as well just buy your pies from Iceland. (Or, erm, Greggs...)

But how do they taste? "Really good" is the answer, not that I'd expect anything less considering what's gone into them. Turns out it's far more pleasurable eating a standalone item surrounded by its own pastry than a slice of a bigger galette (or pot pie, Delia) whose contents have slopped out all over your plate and no longer look as if they were ever really part of a pastry product in the first place. The whole freezer size drama has ended up working in this dish's favour. And while the outcome isn't necessarily high-class and you could consume it out of a (very big) paper bag if you wanted to, it works just as well in this context accompanied by braised carrots and spuds as part of a hearty Sunday dinner.

The description above makes it sound like a lot of hard work, but none of the steps (and sub-steps, and sub-sub-steps) are particularly tricky, all that resting and freezing means the whole process is very linear with absolutely no juggling of simultaneous tasks, and frankly at least 70% of the words up until this point have been me moaning about stuff or waxing lyrical about Greggs anyway, so it's not like this post is a reliable indicator of anything.

Long story short, then: yes, this one takes time, but if you've got that time, it's actually a really rewarding cooking experience and the end result is a good 'un. Just don't let yourself be pressured into buying a new freezer for the occasion. I bet you Good Housekeeping has shares in Currys.

One-word verdict: Satisfying.