food & drink: Apples + Bacon = 1 Delicious Bacon Apple Galette

Lisa Leutheuser | Contributor

Bacon Apple pies have been all the rage the past few years, and I've been meaning to try this flavor combination for while because, as bacon eaters know, everything is better with bacon! (Well, maybe not everything.) Over the past year I've become quite fond of galettes, easy to make free-form rustic tarts. I'm also quite fond of applewood smoked bacon, so when apple harvest came in I knew what I would be baking.

The question was just how...

I turned over ideas of mixing the bacon in the crust, mixing it up with the apples, or putting it on top. I also felt something else was needed flavor-wise to bring it all together. What goes well with both pork and apples? Maple syrup! In the end, I opted to cook the bacon first, then carmelize it in maple syrup, and use it as the finally topping on the galette.

The result is smashingly delicious. Of course, I'm biased, but I took the first one to a pot-luck BBQ, and judging by how fast it vanished, a good number of my friends agree. The salty bacon contrasts with the sweet apple, and the smoked flavor from the bacon and the carmeltized maple sryup add depth — and it's all wrapped up in a flakey buttery crust.

Stop over at kitchenchick.com for the recipe. The dough recipe makes enough for two galettes, so you could do one with bacon and, for vegetarian friends, another with just apples (and some orange zest for extra zing).

If you've never made a pie crust from scratch, then galettes are a good place to start. The dough is forgiving, and there's no need to roll out a perfect circle. Part of a galette's charm is its rustic look. The main thing to watch for are cracks or other places in the crust where carmalized sugar and apple's juice can leak out during baking.

Lisa Leutheuser, aka Kitchen Chick, has been blogging about food since 2004 at kitchenchick.com .