Recipe: Labneh and Baby Potato Galette with Everything Bagel Crust
A perfect entertaining recipe, by chef/artist Zoë Komarin
Brace yourselves, home cooks: It’s officially holiday cooking season.
It’s not just that there’s Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Year’s Eve to consider. It’s the company holiday gatherings, the school potlucks, the visiting relatives to host — oh, and you have to keep feeding your family dinner too. Allow me to offer you a blanket solution: Make a galette.
Galettes are basically freeform pies with no top. Their fillings can be sweet or savory. To me, the very act of baking something like a galette is holiday-coded. Plus, galettes are not just festive, they are also forgiving. It’s okay for a galette’s crust to be uneven. It’s okay for it to look homemade. We call that ~*rustic*~.
But can a galette ever be easy enough to be a viable weeknight dinner, too? Can it be sophisticated but not precious? Can it be an entire meal? I went to LA-based chef, artist, and fellow Substack writer Zoë Komarin with these questions. Her answer: A thousand percent yes, especially if you skip making your own dough and use frozen puff pastry instead.
I am always inspired by Zoë’s approach to cooking: She makes feeding others a party (often literally — whether with her Pita Party pop-ups or her new MouthBrain hands on cooking events). I wasn’t at all surprised that after making her galette for the first time, I wanted to serve it to company. I’ve already served it at a break-fast dinner last month; and I’m bringing it to a Friendsgiving potluck later this month. This is the kind of recipe that’s so easy to get right, and so impressive on the table that it will make even the most reluctant host want to invite friends over. It would absolutely be at home on a Thanksgiving table.
More on the recipe itself, from Zoë:
The key is to get everything ready to go while the puff pastry is thawing, roughly 30 minutes. That way all that’s left is to layer it all and chuck it in the oven. Similarly while it bakes you can use that time to dump a bag of washed mixed greens into a bowl and dress them lightly with lemon, olive oil, s+p. It’s a pizza and salad kinda vibe.
Please let Zoë and me know if you make the recipe by sharing your results in Table Chat and tagging us on Instagram: @hillarydixlercanavan and @zoefoodparty.
And, if you like this recipe, here are some others you might like too:
Any Vegetable Tart (Melissa Clark, NYT Cooking)
Triple-Threat Onion Galette (Sohla El-Waylly, Bon Appétit)
Tomato and Goat Cheese Tarts (Ina Garten, Food Network)