Goat Cheese and Heirloom Tomato Galette

If you love making savory tarts, this goat cheese and heirloom tomato galette is calling your name! The intense flavor and beautiful colors of the heirloom tomatoes and tangy goat cheese are all wrapped up in a rustic crust making for a tomato pie which is low stress and oh so good.

Do you know what season this is?

It’s tomato season!! 🙂

It’s finally the time of year when we can walk right past those supermarket tomatoes because we already have better tomatoes sitting out on our counters. When tomatoes are juicy and ripe and come in all sorts of fun colors. And when I make All the Things tomato. Caprese with Burrata, Gazpacho, Pasta with Raw Tomato Sauce, and more! There are so many great recipes for fresh tomatoes and I want them all.

Happily, tomato season is a fairly long one. Unlike English peas season (blink and you’ll miss it) or strawberry season (blink twice), you can find fresh, local tomatoes for about 3 months around here. Mid-July through to the end of October.

Starting with the little tomatoes – grape tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, since they are the first to ripen; then onto beefsteak tomatoes which will carry on through the whole season; and then an ever changing menu of heirloom tomatoes, which make it fun to visit the farm stand every week to see what they have, I’ll have lots of tomatoes to enjoy for months to come.

One thing that’s great about living where I do is that I have three different farms all in easy driving distance, two of which have mostly beefsteak and one that has all the pretty colors. Depending on what I’m making and how much I want to spend, I pick a farm and go buying. I hope that where you are you can find some heirloom tomatoes too!

Though maybe you grow your own? My black thumb keeps me from growing tomatoes, or much in the way of food stuffs other than herbs, but I know that a properly green thumb and a few tomato plants can keep you in tomatoes for months.

Yes, I do have a black thumb. It has been empirically proven with the dead husks of numerous plants. Also the time I grew zucchini. Without actually growing any zucchini. I am probably the only person you know who grew healthy zucchini plants and ate no zucchini from them. So, I leave tomatoes to the experts. 🙂

Enough getting excited about all the tomatoes in my future. It’s time to talk tomato galette!

Crostatas and galettes are so much fun to make that I wonder why I wasn’t making them all the time. Instead, of these adorably rustic pies, I was always all about more formal pies in pie plates and tart pans. While I still love them (see my Mixed Berry Pie for proof), I can’t resist making rustic tarts these days.

First, I made a Strawberry Ricotta Crostata; then a Savory Summer Squash Crostata. And now a galette!

For this tart, I decided to work with some French influences and went with goat cheese as the creamy layer over the crust, and then I grated some aged Comte and mixed that in.

From there, all you have to do is slice the tomatoes, layer them over the cheese, and sprinkle it all with basil. Then fold the crust into a rough circle and bake. How simple is that?

Easy as pie! Sorry, I couldn’t resist…

I know you’re sitting thinking about the pie crust.

You are, aren’t you?

And thinking that pie crust isn’t simple or easy. Well, lucky for you I have the easiest and best crust recipe around. I am not kidding even a little. My Easy Pie Crust turns everything you know about crust upside down to produce a crust which is flaky and amazing and almost impossible to screw up. I won’t say completely impossible because I know someone out there could do it, but they would have to try very hard.

Other than that, they only thing you need to know about making this tomato galette is to salt the tomatoes. Seed them and salt them. Too much moisture is the enemy of a galette! You don’t want a soggy galette, so don’t forget the salting.

– Happy Baking, Annemarie

Print Recipe

Goat Cheese and Heirloom Tomato Galette

This savory tomato galette is a rustic tart in the French tradition, full of juicy, sweet heirloom tomatoes and creamy goat cheese and then folded into a simple pastry crust.

Prep Time2 hours hrs 30 minutes mins

Cook Time35 minutes mins

Total Time3 hours hrs 5 minutes mins

Course: Side Dish

Cuisine: French

Servings: 8 servings

Calories: 400kcal

Author: Just a Little Bit of Bacon

Ingredients

Galette Crust

• 1 cup (140 gm, 5 oz) white all purpose flour
• ¾ cup (105 gm, 3.75 oz) whole wheat flour
• ½ tsp table salt
• 14 tbsp (200 gm, 7 oz) unsalted butter, cut into ½ inch cubes
• ¼ cup (60 ml, 2 oz) cold water

Galette Filling

• 1 1/2 lb (700 gm) tomatoes, sliced 1/4 inch thick
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 6 oz (170 gm) goat cheese
• 2 oz (55 gm) aged comte, or parmesan
• 1/4 cup sliced fresh basil
• 2 tbsp olive oil

Instructions

Galette Crust

• Mix together the white and whole wheat flours in a large bowl. Spoon about ⅔ of the flour into a food processor. Add the salt. Give the food processor a few pulses to mix everything together. Toss the butter cubes evenly over the surface of the flour. Pulse the flour and butter together until they have combined to form a paste and there is no dry flour left, about 25 pulses. Break up any large clumps of dough with a silicone spatula and then sprinkle the remaining flour into the bowl of the food processor. Pulse 5 more times to allow the dry flour to break up the dough, but don't let it combine with the butter.
• Transfer the dough to the large bowl, sprinkle the water over the dough, and use the spatula to mix the water into the dough. Once the dough begins to come together, work the dough with your hands for a few moments, or until you get a nice, smooth ball of dough. Press the dough into a disc, wrap with plastic wrap and chill for 2 hours.

Assembling and Baking the Galette

• Seed the tomato slices and toss them with the kosher salt. Let them sit for about 30 minutes. Then layer the tomatoes with paper towels and press them gently until they are quite dry.
  
• Preheat oven to 400F.
  
• Take the dough out of the refrigerator and let it warm up for a while before you begin rolling. You want the dough to be pliable but not soft. If the dough begins to crack around the edges, it is still too cool. Wait a little longer. Cut a piece of parchment paper about the size of your baking pan. Dust the parchment and the dough with flour. Roll out the dough, dusting with more flour as needed, until it's a 13-14 inch circle. Transfer the dough and the parchment paper to a baking pan.
• Sprinkle the goat cheese and shredded comte over the center of the dough circle. Leave a 2-3 inch space around the edges with no cheese. This is the part you will be folding over.
• Layer the slices of tomato over the cheese until it is all covered and you have used all or at least most of the tomato. Sprinkle the basil over the top. Fold over the edges of the dough onto the tomato slices, pleating the edges and patting it into place. Brush the dough and tomatoes with olive oil.
  
• Bake the galette for 30-40 minutes. Until the crust is golden brown and the tomatoes are soft and starting to brown too.
  
• Allow the galette to cool to room temperature, then slice and serve.
  

Notes

• I make the crust the same way as my Easy Pie Crust recipe, except I use a slightly different ingredients list. If you want to look at a step by step guide to making the crust, visit that post. I have pictures of each step.
• You can use all red tomatoes in the galette, but it is especially pretty if you have two or three colors (such as red, yellow, and green) to layer into the filling.
• The key word here is rustic! Your galette doesn't need to be perfectly round and even. Just make sure you have patted down the dough after you've folded it over so that it keeps its shape.
• Any of the Italian shredding cheeses will work in place of the Comte. Parmesan, Romano, Asiago are all good here. However, I would highly recommend shredding the cheese yourself so it's fresh.

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