Purple Carrot & Rhubarb Galette

Honey-caramelized ribbons of purple carrots and early season rhubarb layered on carrot green pesto and wrapped in a flakey golden crust. The perfect vegetarian appetizer, side, or light lunch.

Hi everyone, and happy May! My local supermarket is bursting with spring produce so I felt the need to do something a bit fun with the bunches and bunches of purple carrots I saw on the shelves this week!

Galettes are a simple, rustic bake that can be made savory or sweet. A galette, put simply, is an open-faced faced shallow pie. You roll out your pie dough in a round-ish shape, cover the center with your respective filling, then fold up the edges, neatly tucking in your mixture. Galettes are perfect for pie dough novices, if you just don’t feel like shaping a full pie, or if you’re working with a low-volume filling (my situation here). The ribboned carrot and rhubarb are not nearly immense enough to fill a full pie dish, even before shrinking in the oven! I also find the homespun openness of galettes just scream “spring” to me.

I consider purple carrots to be the most visually striking carrot, but if you cannot find them or have a purple carrot aversion, the regular orange variety would do splendidly! The rhubarb in this dish blends into the carrot during baking, offering some sharp tartness to break up the sweetness. If you dislike rhubarb or cannot find it, omitting it entirely will still yield a lovely result.

The rhubarb and carrots sit atop a base of carrot greens and broccoli pesto. This pesto utilizes the tops of the purple carrots, which, if you’ve never tried, are a delicious, herbaceous green, akin to parsley. If you do not want to make your own pesto here, a store-bought simple pesto Genovese (the regular basil pesto we all know and love!) would be perfect.

The recipe for the dough I’m using here belongs to Claire Saffitz. I’ve linked the full recipe here in the description, so it will not appear in the instructions below. She uses a bench scraper to cut flakes of cold butter into the dough, a technique I’ve used before and found much more successful than using your hands to rub chunks of butter in. This is the first time I’ve used this specific recipe for pie dough and I do think I will be revisiting! The dough for this recipe doesn’t need to be anything special, just a reliable, delicious pie dough. I do recommend the one I’ve used, but if you have a tried and true recipe of your own, I recommend that one more.

This galette is best served warm with a sprinkle of minced carrot tops. Happy baking!