I stalked a cherry farmer hard this year. Â Every week, I arrived at his market booth asking for sour cherries. Every week he told me they’d be in next week. This went on for more than a month.
Eventually, I caught wind of an email hookup. A guy who sells them from the back of a truck. I emailed him, placed my order, and send my husband to a designated intersection at 8 pm on the agreed-upon date.
It all felt very shady and hilarious, but I got my four pounds of sour cherries, and have been guarding them greedily since.
I used some to make this cherry almond galette. I also made a couple of giant hand pies to take to picnics. I have about a cupful left in the freezer, and I think I’m going to make something boozy. Suggestions welcome.
I adapted this recipe from Izy Hossack’s new book, The Savvy Cook. She describes it’s aim as “maximum flavor for minimum effort, without breaking the bank” and I’d say it delivers on that. It’s full of lots of healthy and achievable vegetarian weeknight dinners and lots of inspiration for variations on a theme. It would be a really nice gift for a new grad moving out to cook for themselves for the first time.
I feel in love with Top with Cinnamon years ago for the lovely photography and baking recipes, so of course I gravitated toward a dessert first. The recipe I used was for the Any-Fruit Free-Form Galette. I love the frangipane layer that fills the gaps between the bubbling cherries.
I adapted the recipe a bit – I used the pie dough I already had on hand (that recipe makes a double crust so use half and freeze the rest) and reduced the almond extract a bit (because I wanted to really taste my precious cherries).
PS. I also now have an ugly tomato hookup who is going to sell me canning tomatoes for super cheap. Woohooo!
Cherry Almond Galette
Ingredients
- 1 recipe for single-crust pie dough Izy offers oat or olive oil pie dough options, but I went with my standard all-butter dough I had in the freezer - link in post
- 1 lb pitted sour or regular cherries
- 6 tbsp granulated sugar use 5 if regular cherries
For frangipane
- ¼ cup granulated sugar
- 3 ½ tbsp unsalted butter softened
- 1 egg
- â…” cup ground almonds
- 2 tbsp all-purpose flour
- pinch of salt
- ½ tsp almond extract
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350ºF. Roll out the pie dough between sheets of parchment paper to 1/8" thickness in a rectangle about the same size as your baking sheet.
- To make the frangipane, cream the sugar and butter until smooth (I used a stand mixer). Mix in the egg, ground almonds, flour, salt and almond extract. Spread the mixture over the dough, leaving a 1 1/4" border around the edges.
- Toss the cherries with the sugar and lay over top of frangipane, then fold over the border of the dough. Bake for about 50 minutes, until bubbling with a golden crust
