Clafouti! Bless you.

Hi! If I’ve seemed remiss in blogging, I’m sorry…but not really sorry, as I’m more into real life than blog life these days. The way I see it, that’s ok and I can just stop by here when the foodie spirit moves me. This also means I have a nice backlog of photos and post topics to choose from! And so today, I bring you clafouti.

Don’t feel bad, I had to read the name twice the first time I saw it mere weeks ago. I’d never heard of such a thing. For that matter, as I write this, I can see that spell check has never heard of such a thing either. So we’re all entitled to a little Wikipedia at this juncture, I’d say.

Clafoutis, sometimes in Anglophone countries spelled clafouti, is a baked French dessert of black cherries arranged in a buttered dish and covered with a thick flan-like batter. The clafoutis is dusted with powdered sugar and served lukewarm.

A traditional Limousin clafoutis contains pits of the cherries. According to baking purists, the pits release a wonderful flavor when the dish is cooked. If the cherry pits are removed prior to baking, the clafoutis will be milder in flavor.

I will go ahead and be “Anglophone” by spelling it without the ‘s’ because clafoutis looks obscene to me. Therefore, Diana > French.

Anyway, I came upon the recipe for clafouti in my copy of The San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market Cookbook. I had a huge surplus of cherries that would go bad if I didn’t use them up, so I turned to this most trustworthy of seasonal recipe guides and was thrilled with the result, liberal adaptations and all.

Cherry Clafouti a la Anglobrat
adapted from The San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market Cookbook

Ingredients:

• 1 tbsp coconut oil
• 1/2 cup sucanat (or sugar, or 1/3 cup NuNaturals baking blend)
• 3 eggs
• zest of 1 lemon
• 1 cup coconut milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• pinch salt
• 3/4 pound unpitted red cherries, stemmed
• powdered sugar for dusting, if desired

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400*. Spread coconut oil across bottom and sides of a shallow 9” or 10” round baking dish. Set on a rimmed cookie sheet.
2. Whisk together the sucanat/sugar, eggs and lemon zest until well blended. Add coconut milk and vanilla and whisk again until blended. Add flour and salt and whisk until batter is frothy.
3. Pour about a third of the batter into the prepared baking dish. Scatter cherries on top in an even layer. Pour the rest of the batter over top, careful not to disturb your cherry arrangement.
4. Bake until golden and puffed and a knife inserted into the center comes out clean, 35-45 minutes (mine was done after 35). Serve at once, dusted with powdered sugar, or cool on a wire rack to room temperature and dust with powdered sugar just prior to serving. Don’t forget to spit out the pits when eating!

Serves 6-8

Ok, so I can’t really say whether or not this clafouti looked or tasted anything like it should have, but I thought it was delicious, and I even got a second opinion to support it. If you’d like something closer to the traditional version, feel free to use cow dairy versions of the coconut ingredients above.

Why do we have the word custard when clafouti expresses so much more? Say it out loud: cusTURD? Stupid yankees.

And on that note, Happy 4th of July weekend!