In this post:

Recipe of Quark and Plum Galette
List of Ingredients
Instruction
Tips and Notes
Variations
Serving
FAQ

A sturdy disc of dough and a soft, juicy filling: a quark and plum galette is a pretty perfect culinary idea.

It can play the role of dessert, but it’s just as happy as a main course. It shows up equally often in “clean eating” cookbooks with fat-free quark and coconut oil… and in the butter-stained, slightly crumpled pages bookmarked by unapologetic hedonists.

There’s just one catch. If, like me, you live in a country where quark is not exactly a mass-produced staple, you’ll have to make it yourself.

Quark is a fairly dense, pressed fermented milk product that can be separated into pieces with a spoon. It has different names in different countries e.g., cottage curd, tvorog and sometimes – cottage cheese. In my blog, I stick to the word quark, although in Finland the word refers to a soft fermented dairy product that is similar in taste and consistency to yogurt. In Russian I prefer the word tvorog (stress on the second syllable) in part to avoid confusion with that local product.

I promise, it’s simple – very simple – but it does require a few extra hours for the milk to sour and for the whey to drain off. So it makes sense to plan your quark and plum galette in advance. But the game is absolutely worth the candle: with homemade quark, a quark and plum galette tastes so much better. And I’ll show you how to make the quark as well.

---

Quark and Plum Galette

healthy version with chia seeds

---

Ingredients

Ingredients for the Dough

• 200 g quark with 0-18% fat
• 50 g rye flour
• 16 g maple syrup
• 1 tbsp chia seeds mixed with 3 tbsp of water

Ingredients for the Filling

• 250 g plums preferably a dark blue, elongated variety
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp ground cardamom you can easily skip this assertive spice
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

Instructions

Step 1: making the dough

• Soak the chia seeds in water and let them swell. This will take about 30 min, so take care of this in advance.
• Preheat the oven to 200 °C, top and bottom heat.
• Add the syrup to the quark and mix the mixture thoroughly.

• Add the seeds to the quark.

• Finally, add the flour and knead into a smooth dough. The dough will be quite wet and sticky.

• Prepare four 15×15 cm squares of baking parchment. Place a quarter of the dough on each square and spread it out over the parchment. It’s easiest to do this with a gloved hand or through a layer of parchment paper.

Step 2: filling preparation

• Cut the washed plums in half and remove the pits.
• Sprinkle the plums with the dry spices.
• Slice the fruit.

Step 3: assembling the galette

• Arrange the pieces over the dough rounds, leaving a 1–2 cm border around the edges. Lay the fruit in a single layer so the galette bakes up pleasantly dry and crisp rather than turning into a compote.

• Fold the edges of the parchment squares inward together with the edges of the dough to form galettes.

• Place the galettes on a baking sheet and put it in the oven. Middle rack, 25 minutes: the edges of the galettes should be nicely golden brown.

Tips & Notes

Be sure to use greaseproof paper for baking, otherwise the galette’s dough will stick to the paper.

Easy Variations

You can cook the quark and plum galette with different fruits or even berries. For example, apples would be great, as would pear. And, yes, it’s a great idea for me to test the lingonberry recipe myself.

The flour here is just as flexible. My favorite version of this galette uses rye flour – it forms an extraordinary chord with the plums, emphasizing their flavor and gently shading their sweetness. But you’re free to go in the direction of amaranth flour, oat flour, or good old wheat flour.

Serving

You can serve the quark and plum galette as a rustic country dish for a summer evening in the gazebo, wrap it in parchment and eat it like fast food in the supermarket parking lot, or turn it into a fine-dining plate with sauce swooshes and a scoop (or three) of ice cream. Yogurt also works well as a topping.

FAQ

1. Can I replace the chia seeds here?

You can skip the chia-step entirely and just add a regular chicken egg, size L, its weight is usually about 60 g.

2. How to make the quark and plum galette with another sweetener?

The sweetener is equally democratic: maple syrup, agave or Jerusalem artichoke syrup, coconut sugar or regular beet sugar – choose whichever one your kitchen (and your mood) suggests today.

3. What about a gluten free version of it?

Yes! Replace gluten-containing rye flour with gluten-free flour, such as oat flour (check the packaging: not every oat flour manufacturer claims their product is gluten-free).

Conclusion

I wrote the recipe for this quark and plum galette about eight years ago on my Russian-language website and can admit: it hasn’t changed much since then (except for my photography style: compare this moment for yourself). Does this speak to its success? It certainly seems so.

Vegetarians of all persuasions praise these galettes with the same enthusiasm as meat eaters. You can swap out the ingredients depending on what’s in your pantry, and each time you get a new combination of flavors, and sometimes even textures.

A perfect dish.

---