Cooked One at a Time, Which Is the Point

Gwenn wrote this part, and it shows. If you only need the egg question answered, the allergens are just below.

Ask me about buckwheat at the hatch and the queue behind you will start to sigh. So here it is written down instead, where nobody is waiting for a galette-saucisse.

Three Things in the Bowl

A galette is buckwheat flour, water and grey salt. That is the recipe, and I have stopped apologising for how short it is. People ask what else goes in, expecting a secret: an egg, a splash of milk, a spoon of wheat flour to make it behave. Plenty of places add those, and their galettes are softer and easier to turn. They are also less of a galette. Without the wheat there is nothing to hold the batter together except time, which is why the rest of this section exists.

The salt is grey salt from the Atlantic marshes, damp and a little mineral, dissolved in cold water before any flour goes near it. The flour goes in in stages and the batter is beaten by hand, for longer than looks sensible. You are working air into it, and there is a moment you can feel through your wrist when it stops being sandy and turns to something like silk. That moment is the job.

Twenty-Four Hours, Then We Talk

The week's batter is made on Tuesday, which is why the van is shut on Tuesdays and why I am no use to anyone that day. It rests for at least twenty-four hours in the cold before it meets a billig. In that time the flour drinks the water properly, the batter loosens, goes faintly sour, and the taste moves from flour toward something nuttier and darker. A galette poured from batter made the same morning tears when you fold it and tastes of the sack. A rested one lifts off the plate in a single sheet, with the lacy edge that crackles when you bite it.

It is also why the fillings for a private event cannot change after the Monday of that week. By Tuesday night the batter for your Saturday is already sitting in its tubs, doing its slow work, and it does not take requests.

Flour From Up the Road

The flour is milled here in Ille-et-Vilaine, not far from Rennes, and I fetch it myself in sacks. Fresh buckwheat flour is grey with dark flecks of hull, smells of hay and toasted hazelnut, and goes stale faster than wheat flour does, so I would rather drive out often for a little than keep a big stock rattling about in the van. When a new harvest comes through, the galettes change slightly in colour and in taste. The regulars notice before I do, and they are never shy about saying so.

Not Wheat. Not Even a Grass.

In Brittany buckwheat is called blé noir, black wheat, and in the rest of France sarrasin, and neither name is honest. It is not wheat. It is not a grass at all, the way wheat, barley, rye and oats are. It belongs to the knotweed family, which makes it a cousin of sorrel and rhubarb, and what we grind is a seed: small, dark and three-sided, like a tiny pyramid. You can see them at the foot of the drawing in the margin. The leaves are heart-shaped, the flowers are white going on pink, and the bees are very keen on it.

It grows fast, in about three months from sowing, and it does not mind poor, acid ground, which goes a long way to explaining why it took root here, where wheat sulked. There is no gluten in it. That is what makes the batter so stubborn and the galette so crisp, and it is the reason a galette made from buckwheat alone needs its day of rest to hold together at all.

The First One Goes in the Bin

Every service starts with a galette nobody eats. The billig has been heating, it looks ready, and it is not telling the truth. The first pour shows you what the plate is really doing today: where the hot spot has wandered to, whether the wind is pulling heat off one side, whether the batter wants a splash more water after the drive. It comes off blotched, thick in one corner, pale in the middle. I fold it, read it like a weather report, and throw it away.

At the Saturday market somebody always offers to take it off my hands. The answer is no, kindly. It is not a free galette, it is a measurement, and if you ate it you would think less of the next two hundred.

The Same Batter, Everywhere

There is one batter. It goes to the Wednesday evening market, to the Friday lunch pitch and to the big Saturday in the centre, and in exactly the same tubs the same batter goes to every wedding, birthday and village fête we feed. Nobody gets a party version. If you have eaten a galette-saucisse from the hatch at eight in the morning, you already know what your guests will be eating at ten at night.

That is probably enough about flour. I did warn you.

Gwenn