Clafoutis your way through the rest of summer
Pantry staples and fruit, what a delight.
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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the stone fruit has been *so* good this year. I’m taking it as a personal gift, since last summer every plum, peach, cherry, and apricot I purchased had to be baked into a galette for my forthcoming book (blah blah we’re all over hearing about this and I don’t even have a preorder link for you yet! uh oh!). To make up for that, pretty much every day for the past four weeks I’ve been trying to find a way to consume at least one piece of raw stone fruit. One highlight was a “mango donut peach” (it did not taste like a mango-peach hybrid, rather like a white peach, but had mango-yellow flesh. Delightful!)
I made two exceptions in my pledge, first for a slice of a roasted-and-raw situation in the form of Nicola Lamb’s stone fruit tart. The other was a cherry clafoutis. I didn’t bake either of those treats myself, but I do have a clafoutis recipe for you today.
Clafoutis is essentially a baked custard threaded with fruit. A very simple project, (you just need a bowl to mix in, a whisk or a fork to beat with, and a vessel to bake in) it’s so nice to throw together for breakfast or that time after lunch and before dinner when you need a sweet treat. Use cherries and you don’t even have to pit them! How carefree you’ll seem tossing it on the table!
This recipe, developed for The Perfect Loaf, uses sourdough starter discard, which is a wildly budget-friendly ingredient. And you definitely don’t need to make a habit of baking your own bread in order to keep a sourdough starter. Bread is certainly cheap to make at home, but it does take a lot of time and energy—you may not have either. But the starter, just a fermented mix of flour and water, can be used in quick bakes anywhere you’d find flour and water (strawberry shortcake, tea cake, and scones, to name just a few), and is always ready to be used.
Sourdough Discard Cherry Clafoutis
Those who don’t have a starter can still make the clafoutis: Use 1/2 cup each of all-purpose flour and water in place of the 1 cup of sourdough starter discard.
