The texture of a good clafouti is somewhere between a pancake and a custard. It should be moist and eggy, but with a noticeable cakey spring to it. Use this basic recipe, which quite literally whizzes together in seconds in a blender, to complement all kinds of fruit, depending on the season.
6 SERVINGS
¼ |
cup sugar, plus 1–2 tablespoons for sprinkling |
3 |
large eggs |
¾ |
cup heavy cream |
¾ |
cup milk |
½ |
teaspoon vanilla extract |
½ |
cup all-purpose flour |
3 |
Bartlett pears |
½ |
cup raw pistachios, chopped |
Heat the oven to 400 degrees and butter a 9-inch pie plate. In a blender or food processor, combine the sugar, eggs, cream, milk and vanilla extract and blend until smooth. Sift the flour over the mixture and pulse just to mix. Set the batter aside for 10 minutes.
While the batter is resting, peel the pears and cut them in half lengthwise. Using a spoon (a grapefruit spoon works best), remove the vein for the stem and the seed pit. Cut each half into thin crosswise slices between ¼ and ½ inch thick, keeping the pear in its original form. (This will take some time at first, but you’ll soon get the hang of it.) As you finish each pear, flatten it slightly, lightly pushing down against the cutting board and toward the base of the pear. Lift it, using the flat of the knife as a spatula, and carefully place it in the pie plate with the stem end pointing toward the center. Depending on the size of the pears, only 5 of the 6 halves may fit. Pour the batter over the top and sprinkle with the pistachios. Sprinkle the top with sugar.
Place the pie plate on a baking sheet to catch any spills and bake until the clafouti is puffed and brown, about 45 minutes. Let cool slightly before serving.
The first time I saw a picture of a clafouti, I knew I had to make one. The dish was gorgeous, something like a cross between a pancake and a custard—puffed and brown and homey and dotted with melting cherries. I ran out and bought the cherries, whipped up the batter and stuck the clafouti in the oven. What came out was much more a pancake than a custard, and a pretty tough little pancake at that. Oh, well, I thought, and filed it away under “lessons learned.”
Several years later, eating dinner with my daughter in a little French restaurant in New York, clafouti showed up on the menu. Still curious, I tried it again: it was nothing like the one I’d made. This clafouti was tender, almost custardy. It was perfect with cherries, and I could easily see how it could be adapted to fit other summer fruit.
This time I was determined to get it right. I gathered a stack of French cookbooks and went to work. Julia Child’s recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking turned out to be much closer to what I had in mind. Lulu Peyraud and Richard Olney’s Lulu’s Provençal Table turned out to be much the same as Child’s, though quite a bit sweeter (½ cup sugar to Child’s ⅓ cup).
On a whim I checked out Joël Robuchon and Patricia Wells’s Simply French, another cookbook that has been a never-fail source of great recipes. Predictably, Robuchon’s recipe is very much a reinterpretation—a custard in a pastry crust, with fragments of cookie dough on top. But Wells included her own recipe—one made with pears and star anise. Surprisingly, the batter—made with equal parts cream and milk—turned out to be much more like what I had in mind than the milk-based recipes.
Armed with the fruits of my research and apricots and plums from the market, I set to work inventing my own clafouti. After several trials, I ended up with Wells’s combination of milk and cream, but with more flour to make it a bit more cakey and much less sugar.
The truly wonderful thing about this recipe is its adaptability. A clafouti is just about the perfect way to present soft fruits. Tweak the seasoning just a little, and you can make this recipe with cherries (substitute cherry liqueur or vanilla for the almond extract), peaches or nectarines (combine with raspberries instead of almonds) or plums (a little ground cloves, or maybe dust the top with cinnamon sugar).
You can’t imagine anything easier. Essentially, this is a very eggy pancake batter that you simply pour over sliced fruit. Mix the batter in a food processor or blender (the blender does a better job of dispersing the flour), let it stand for 10 minutes or so, pour it over the fruit and then stick the whole thing in the oven.