Clafoutis, the rustic, eggy beauty from France, most certainly stands alone. It’s easy to whip together, delicious whether rewarmed or freshly baked and still gooey or left over for a few days and eaten as cold, firm petits fours with your hot morning coffee. It comforts while exuding an unpretentious elegance. Yet it is not original in technique or ingredients, one of many dishes sharing lineage in the Family of the Delicious.
Recipe: Stone Fruit Clafoutis
American-style pancakes, crepes, Dutch babies, Yorkshire puddings and clafoutis all share the same ingredients. So what makes them so different from one another? The ratio of eggs to flour to fat. And that — that flexibility, the wide range of how a few core components are used — is to me the beauty of baking.
Why is this thrilling? Well, because it’s a lesson in what ratios can do for texture and body, and, more interesting (and exciting), an education in how you can make decisions based on this understanding.
One of the biggest clichés (and untruths) about baking is how rigid it all is. In all my years teaching pastry and baking, the thing I have found myself saying time and time again is this: Experience and practice have far more to do with baking excellence than any kind of exactitude.
Once you know what each of your ingredients is and isn’t capable of, you can start to experiment.
Of course, you can’t simply throw things together. It takes time and some experience to know that an egg can create texture and leavening, depending on how it’s used. Or that time and temperature often have as much to do with how a recipe turns out as the order in which you add your ingredients. But once you know what each of your ingredients is and isn’t capable of, you can start to experiment.
Clafoutis is so exciting to me because in addition to its resplendent texture and flavor, you can see exactly what its ingredients do and categorize it as “a dish to play with.” These are my favorite kinds of recipes. You see where it comes from and where it has traveled. And you can have fun: This version toys with the original, switching out the traditional cherries for plums or peaches, its stone-fruit cousins, larger but just as sweet. (Only recently did I learn that a clafoutis that replaces the cherries with another fruit is actually known in France as a flognarde.)
After making it once or twice as written, you might also use this base to see just what happens if you use more eggs, fewer eggs, more milk or less. What if you bake it in a water bath? What if you fry the batter? This is how recipes are written and new ideas, and dishes, are formed.
I want everyone to arrive at this place, where baking is unfussy and innovating. The real trick? Learning to accept a bit of failure and chalk it up to valuable insight. The fear of failure is the hardest obstacle in any cooking.
Great technicians across the globe would probably shake their fists at these seemingly irreverent conjectures. While my generous approach comes from years of bending over backward to meet high-form pastry technique, I just want everyone to know that baking can be a place where you take risks, often to happy outcomes — especially if you take confidence in the things you already know.
These days, I’m still very much learning and experimenting, but it’s never the exactness that brings out my best. Having a solid foundation and understanding of my ingredients is what continues to help me feel as if I’ll always be successful as a true baker who can unpack even the smartest, most precise recipes and make them my own.
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