By Leslie Brenner

Lazy bakers, this one’s for you.

If you know anything about galettes, you know that the free-form pastries are super-forgiving, nearly foolproof. Hard to imagine, then, that the enticing tart shown in the photo above is actually (ahem!) a failed galette.

Here’s how it came to be. (I promise to make the story snappy and get right to the super-easy recipe.) On a recent trip to France, my husband Thierry and I lucked into a kilometers-long stretch of wild blackberry vines. After picking our way into purple-fingered, mûre sauvage happiness — with about a kilo of wild blackberries as our prize — I thought, time to bake a galette. I was looking for ease, didn’t want to make a pastry cream, and didn’t have a tart pan (or a rolling pin, or measuring tools, or a full-size oven) in Thierry’s mom’s kitchen.

I reached for Melissa Clark’s excellent New York Times master recipe for Fruit Galette. I had to make the galette oval, not round (to fit in the tiny oven!) but the wild blackberry galette was pretty damn wonderful! In fact, quick and easy as it was, it was one of the best tarts I’d ever made.

And so, when I returned home to Texas and wanted to make a lazy-person’s dessert featuring summer-into-fall blackberries and plums, I thought — naturally — of a galette.

Thing is, I’m crazy about whole grains and ancient grains, and love to incorporate them in baking projects whenever possible. Buckwheat, I thought, would be particularly nice with those deep early autumn fruit flavors, so half the flour would be buckwheat flour (and the rest all-purpose flour). I’d cut back the sugar and cornstarch — as I did with the wild berry galette — expecting success.

But when I tried rolling out the dough, it refused to hold together.

Aha!, I thought. Buckwheat does not have gluten, so the dough is not elastic enough to roll, even after resting an hour.

I pivoted, grabbed a 9-inch tart pan with a removable bottom, and pressed the dough into it: a perfect fit. Much easier than pie. (Anyone with fear of crust-rolling should be delighted!)

I chose not to blind-bake the crust, and didn’t give the dough time to rest after pressing it into the pan: This is truly a lazy baker’s tart. No need to peel any fruit, nor meticulously arrange carefully cut fruit into concentric circles. Just cut the plums in eighths (removing the pits), toss them with blackberries, sugar, cornstarch and a pinch of salt, dump the mixture into the crust, scatter sliced almonds on top (no need to toast first), and bake. It’s that simple.

And it was amazingly good. I’ll be baking this baby again and again. (Can’t wait, in fact!) The buckwheat flavor was right on; the crust was tender and flaky; the almonds were lovely with the the fruit, whose flavors concentrated gorgeously.

Want to try? Here’s the recipe.

Recipe: Plum and Blackberry Buckwheat Tart

Happy autumn!