Ya Pear Galette with Pinenuts and Lemon-Pepper Honey Glaze

I was at Fubonn again last weekend. I swear it’s like my mallrat addiction now, on a cold day I just love to walk around and around that place and ogle all of the produce that I’ve never heard of before. I try to pick up one new fruit or vegetable each time I’m there and taste it, figure out how to cook it, how to elevate it or introduce it to western cuisine.

This time I played it a bit safe and got a ya pear. It looks kinda like a cross between a regular Asian pear and a bosc pear, but has that crisp fragrance expected in an Asian pear. Turns out that along with lemons and nuts, pear is one of the ingredients in this month’s In the Bag food blog event, hosted by the lovely Julia at A Slice of Cherry Pie. So I was happy to join in the fun with newfound fruit.

I originally didn’t want to do a dessert (because I’m afraid of pastry, I’ll be honest), but then someone else did the classic pear-walnut salad that I wanted to do, so I had to step up my game a bit. I’d made a pear galette once before (like TEN YEARS AGO), so I decided to just tweak it a bit to make something more interesting. China meets France.

(Oh man! I just had this great idea as I was typing this to do a hazelnut-crusted pork loin with pears and caramelized shallots and lemons, but oh well. Another day.)

Ya Pear Galette with Pinenuts and Lemon-Pepper Honey Glaze
Makes 2 galettes

Pastry
3/4 c AP flour
pinch salt
1 tbsp sugar
4 tbsp cold butter
3 or so tbsp ice water

Whisk together the dry ingredients. In a food processor (or with a pastry cutter) cut the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse meal with pea-sized nubs of butter. Sprinkle in the ice water and stir together (or pulse a couple times) until the dough starts to come together. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and mush the dough together into a ball. Cut the ball in half and wrap each in plastic wrap. Fridge for an hour or freezer for 20 minutes until the dough resembles modeling clay in texture.

Lemon-Pepper Honey Glaze
juice and zest from one lemon
2 tbsp honey – I used mesquite honey
3 or 4 cracks of black pepper
1 tbsp butter

Melt these together in the microwave for 1 minute, watching carefully and stirring every 10 seconds or so.

Assembling the galette
1 ya pear, cored and thinly sliced
pinch of cinnamon
1 tsp sugar
2 tbsp pine nuts

Preheat oven to 350 F. Line a baking sheet with parchment. Toss the pear slices gently with the sugar and cinnamon.

Pull the dough out of the chiller and turn out onto a lightly floured surface. Roll out as thin as is feasible – you should get each ball to about 10″ in diameter. Lay the pear slices in two overlapping rows, leaving an inch of dough around the perimeter. Sprinkle 1 tbsp of pinenuts on each galette. Brush the lemon-pepper honey glaze over the fruit and give each galette another crack of pepper. Fold over the edges of the dough as pictured above. Brush the dough with some milk or cream and sprinkle a pinch of sugar over the top.

Bake for 10 minutes, then brush more glaze over the fruit. Another ten minutes, and brush some glaze. Then bake another 5-10 more minutes or until the pastry is golden brown. Brush once more and cool on a rack. Serve warm. This is probably great with vanilla ice cream.