The French just know so incredibly well how to create refined soul food with simple ingredients! The other day, Arne and me have been to Leipzig, and before we headed back to Berlin with total winter chaos around us, we enjoyed a nice break in the most beautiful art nouveau café and bistro Maître. We had a truly sensational buckwheat Galette complète – I have to admit that I have never heard of this dish before and learned later that it is a Breton classic served with Emmental cheese and a fried egg (we ordered without bacon which normally belongs to it as well). We finished with wonderful cake and marveled at the snow outside – just perfect.

Back at home, I thought of a last truffle season’s delight – and as many sorts of truffles profit a lot from some resting time in a greasy environment like butter or eggs, I prepared a close-to-galette dough (the close-to-explanation follows below) for a nice bianchettto truffle and served the thin pancakes with fried eggs which had been in touch with a tuber fellow as well. Instead of Emmental cheese I chose some gorgeous AOC l’Etivaz from the Waadtländer Alps in Switzerland which has a nice taste of nuts and toffee.

And here is complete happyness (with the best ingredients hidden in the dough and under the egg):

Here’s my recipe

This one is not a spontaneous dish, but you won’t be disappointed, I promise. The following instructions will end up with four small galettes.

On the evening before galette showtime, carefully crack four eggs, each one of it in a separate small twist-off glass. Gently clean a small bianchetto truffle of about 8 g with a brush and cut into not too fine slices. Give some of the slices into each of the glasses – be careful not to damage the egg yolks.

The next morning, prepare the galette dough. I had no idea how it is done, so I looked up the general ingredients at Wikipedia , and as ingredients and look turned out to be very similar to bliny dough (the thin ones, not the fluffy things which are Oladje), I used my bliny recipe parameters for the amounts of liquid and flour. Only problem: At the organic shop, I had forgotten to buy buckwheat flour and grapped the wrong spelt – 1050 instead of full grain. Buckwheat and full grain together add a hearty taste to any kind of pancakes and crêpes – what a pitty that I had to miss both. Thank goodness, the close-to-galette-pancakes tasted great nevertheless.

I bravely mixed 1 egg, 100 g 1050 spelt flour – you better go for 50:50 buckwheat and full grain spelt or wheat flour – salt, 2 g dry yeast, 175 ml milk, 25 ml sunflower oil, a tiny bit of honey, and another bianchetto tuber of 8 g, cleaned with a brush and finely cut into very tiny pieces. On Evas blog kochpoetin I have read a lot about yeast dough resting overnight in the fridge. This seemed perfect for my purpose as the tuber needs some time to give its flavor to the dough – but the egg in the dough would not be happy to stand the time outside a cool place. The long rest in the fridge did a good job on both sides.

I the evening, first of all get the truffle slices out of the egg glasses. Cut them into very fine pieces. Get the dough out of the fridge, add the truffle pieces to the dough (which is double-truffled now, so to speak), mix well again and let rest at room temperature for one hour.

Grape about 100 g of l’Etivaz cheese. Heat some butter and sunflower oil on medium heat in two big iron pans. Give a ladle of dough in each pan and spread it carefully to get a thin galette. Turn, put some cheese in the middle and give one truffle flavored raw egg upon each galette. Fold the sides in a little bit so that you get squares, close the lid and let the egg whites get firm (and the yolks hot but still liquid) at low temperature. Add salt and pepper and some chopped basil leaves and enjoy. The same procedure for the second round – or if you want to serve all four galettes at once, pre-bake all galettes and then fill, fold and fry two of them in each pan.

Like always, here’s a Berlin photo topic as well with some corners and moments that Arne catched the other day in Kreuzberg. Those where the lucky times short before winter returned…

The Dish – Berlin Kreuzberg, February 2013

Windows – Aqua Butzke, Berlin Kreuzberg, February 2013

The Photo – Berlin Kreuzberg, February 2013

Signs – Berlin Kreuzberg, February 2013

Remains of Last Summer – Prinzessinnen-Gärten, Berlin Kreuzberg, February 2013

Walls – Aqua Butzke, Berlin Kreuzberg, February 2013

As the galettes are a real pleaser on a party buffet, I offer this post to Dorothée of Bushcooks Kitchen with her birthday party blog event: