Looking for a great dessert to make this winter?  You love pie and want to try something slightly different.  Give crostata a try.  Crostata is an Italian baked tart or pie.  Another name is galette, which is a French term.  The term crostata and galette can be used interchangeably.  The crostata is baked without a pie pan and the result looks rustic and quite special.  As we’re big fans of Ina Garten, we gave her pear and cranberry crostata recipe (as shared below) a go.  What we found was delicious and the pear and cranberry combination worked really well.

Recipe - Adapted & Modified from Ina Garten

Ina also has a crust recipe, but I used Pillsbury pie crust from the store and just rolled it out to save time.

Filling

3 lbs Bosc pears

½ tsp grated orange zest

2 TBS dried cranberries

½ cup flour

½ cup sugar

½ tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp ground allspice -  *  I used ¼ but would reduce next time to 1/8 tsp.  It was a little strong

1 stick of butter diced

Preheat oven to 450 degrees

The recipe calls for putting the dough on parchment paper on a cookie sheet.  I put mine in a pie dish and after putting the filling in loosely pulled up the sides. 

Filling:

Peel, core, and quarter the pears.  Cut each quarter into big chunks.  Toss the chunks with the orange zest.  Place pear mix on top of the dough.

Combine the flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon, and allspice in the bowl of food processor and add butter and pulse until the mixture is crumbly.  Place filling on top of the pears and then pleat the dough half way up the sides.

Bake 30 minutes.