Rustic Peach Galette with Flaky Cream Cheese Crust and Vanilla Cream

Why does cream cheese make a rustic peach galette flaky?

A galette crust gets its flakes without any laminating or turning. This one is a standard butter pastry with 2 tablespoons of cold cream cheese worked in alongside the butter. Cream cheese adds a little fat, a little moisture and a faint tang. The practical benefit is flexibility: the dough bends when you pleat the edges instead of splitting, which matters more for a galette than for a pie that sits in a dish.

Keep everything cold. Cut the butter into small cubes and return it to the fridge while you measure the flour. Work the fat in with a pastry cutter or your fingertips until the mix looks like coarse meal with pea sized lumps of butter still visible. Those lumps are what you want. In a 400°F oven they melt and release steam, which pushes the layers apart.

Add ice water a tablespoon at a time and stop as soon as a pinch of dough holds together. Wet dough shrinks and turns tough. Chill the disc for at least 30 minutes so the gluten relaxes and the butter firms back up before rolling.

Which peaches work best, and what can you swap in?

Choose peaches that give slightly when you press near the stem and smell sweet at room temperature. Freestone varieties, which are most common from midsummer on, release the pit cleanly and slice into neat wedges. Rock hard, cold stored peaches won't soften into jam in the time the crust needs, so let them ripen on the counter for a day or two first. Peeling is optional; the skins soften in the oven and give the filling a rosy color.

The same method handles other stone fruit and berries with small changes.

Underripe fruit tastes flat. An extra tablespoon of sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice will help it along.

Where does all that peach juice go?

Ripe peaches are mostly water, and a galette has no pan walls to hold it in. The juice has two ways to ruin the crust: it soaks the dough before the pastry sets, or it runs out the sides and burns on the sheet. A few habits keep the juice where it belongs.

• Toss the slices with sugar, flour and cardamom, then let them sit for 10 minutes. The sugar pulls juice out now instead of in the oven.
• Lift the fruit out with a slotted spoon and add back only about 2 tablespoons of the liquid. The rest is lovely stirred into the vanilla cream or iced tea.
• Leave a 2 inch border of dough and fold it over the fruit, so the pleats form a wall.
• Bake on the lower third rack, where the sheet pan gets the most direct heat.

If juice still escapes, don't panic. Slide a spatula under the galette as soon as it comes out, before the sugar hardens, and it'll release cleanly.

Galette vs pie: what changes when there's no pan?

A pie dish insulates the bottom crust. Glass and ceramic heat slowly, so a double crust pie often needs an hour or more and a preheated baking sheet to avoid a pale base. A galette sits straight on parchment on a metal sheet, and heat reaches the dough right away. That's why this one bakes in 40 to 45 minutes and comes out crisp underneath.

There's less fruit relative to pastry, too. About 1 1/2 pounds of peaches fill this tart, compared with roughly 3 pounds for a deep dish pie. The filling reduces faster and tastes more concentrated, and the open center lets steam escape instead of trapping it under a top crust.

The loose shape also forgives mistakes. A torn edge can be patched with a scrap and a dab of water. If you like rustic fruit desserts that don't need rolling at all, the oat topped apple crisp with a crunchy crumble uses the same idea of letting fruit bubble up and thicken in the open.

Warm slices and cold vanilla cream

Let the galette cool on the pan for 15 to 20 minutes before slicing. The juices need that time to thicken; cut it straight from the oven and they'll run across the board.

The vanilla cream here isn't whipped. Stir cold heavy cream with vanilla bean paste and powdered sugar just until it thickens slightly and coats a spoon. It should pool around the warm slice rather than sit on top in a stiff cloud, and the contrast between hot pastry and cold cream is most of the pleasure. Vanilla ice cream or crème fraîche work if you'd rather skip it.

On a summer dessert table, the galette sits well next to a berry pavlova with softly whipped cream, since one is crisp and buttery and the other is light and airy. Sprinkle the rim with turbinado sugar before baking and the crust will crackle when you cut into it.