It’s That Simple is our series about recipes so easy, you can make them with your eyes closed. Think tiny ingredient lists, laid-back techniques, and results so delicious you’ll text home about them.
Every dinner party, even those with the most robust menus, requires a little something for people to snack on when they arrive. Thanksgiving, the Olympics of dinner parties, is no different. If you’re like me and find it hard to convince yourself to squeeze anything more complicated than a cheese plate onto an already lengthy to-do list, then you’ll appreciate this breezy galette. It’s basically a cheese plate in pastry form.
Inspired by the baked Brie my mom used to set out at her holiday gatherings, it requires just five ingredients and five minutes before it hits the oven. My mom went big with her baked brie, adorning the pastry-wrapped round of cheese with on-theme holiday shapes she’d cut out of the dough scraps with cookie cutters. My move is more lo-fi: Imagine a slick of sweet jam (you can use whatever you’ve got, but I’m particularly fond of fig or apricot), a layer of thinly sliced Brie, a few cracks of black pepper, and a couple sprigs of woodsy thyme tucked here and there, all on that same sheet of store-bought puff.
As the galette bakes, the cheese melts, the jam bubbles, and the crust gets crispy and golden brown—a sweet-savory insurance policy for peckish guests, and a gift to yourself at the end of the night if you happen to discover one leftover slice while you’re doing the dishes.
