Everyone's a beginner sometime

Everybody who is a professional at something was once a beginner. And everybody who is a beginner was once a person who had no idea the thing they were beginning even existed.

I was in the latter category until a few weeks ago, poring over some cooking magazine I’d decided was worth a trial subscription.

Enter the galette. As soon as I saw the picture, I messaged a friend who’s a far more experienced baker than me. How have I been alive this long, I asked her, and not known about the lazy river of pies?

I’m guessing about a third of you are saying, “I know, right?” The other two thirds of you are saying, “What the (expletive) is a galette?”

It sounds like bird or a razor or some outdated slang ... ”Everybody’s dated her. She’s the school galette.”

Easiest way to describe it is a foldover pie, somewhere between pie and cobbler on the dessert scale.

In the weeks since I’ve first seen that photo, I’ve had four attempts. The first one was perfect, the second not as perfect, the third a disaster and the fourth still to be completely eaten.

You start by letting a refrigerated pie crust sit on the counter for 30 minutes because you’re not committed enough to make your own crust. While that’s going on, you set the oven to 425.

A half-cup of sugar because it’s a dessert. A couple tablespoons of cornstarch because the filling has to thicken somehow. A teaspoon of cinnamon because it needs some spice. A quarter teaspoon of salt to bring out the flavor. Some lemon zest because you can’t forget lemon zest.

After those dry ingredients are whisked together, you pull your fruit from the freezer. A 12- to 15-ounce bag of some berries has worked fine, and I’ll eventually try out apples, mangos and peaches.

Once all of the fruit pieces have been coated a little bit in that dry mix, sprinkle in a couple tablespoons of lemon juice because you can’t just use one part of a lemon.

That pie crust should be ready to unroll, either onto a parchment-lined baking sheet or a pie dish. The baking sheet makes it a little easier to stretch out the crust. You want a crust stretched out enough to navigate, but not thin enough that it will break. That happened on attempt one, and pretty much turned attempt three into a cobbler.

The fruit gets centered on the crust, and stacked so there’s a border of pie crust between 1.5 and 2 inches. That border gets folded over, brushed with egg wash (egg beaten lightly with a tablespoon of water) and sprinkled with sugar. You chop up a few small pieces of butter for the top because you can’t forget butter.

It goes in the oven for 22-25 minutes, or just long enough to stream some episode on your chosen app. Once you pull it from the oven, you let the dessert cool and the filling thicken and stream another episode. Once the credits start for the second episode, you’ll have just enough time to cut a slice and add either whipped cream or ice cream for your third episode of the night. Or you can share it with friends and guests if you’re forced to.

I’ve read that it takes 10,000 hours of doing something to become great at anything. Let’s just call this instruction set an hour of galette making.

Just 9,996 to go. Maybe cherry next time. It’s good to be a beginner.

Kevin Wilson is editor at the Eastern New Mexico News. He can be contacted at 575-763-3431, ext. 320, or by email:

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