Clafoutis, The Forager’s Pantry: Cooking with Wild Edibles by Elen Zachos. Photography by Douglas Merriam.
Many home cooks want to experiment with wild foods and explore new flavours, but don’t know where to start? The Forager’s Pantry was written for you.
This comprehensive and accessible book by Ellen Zachos takes readers through spices and herbs, flowers, fruit, greens, nuts and seeds, tubes and roots, and mushrooms, showing how some of the best ingredients come from nature itself.
The Forager’s Pantry is for any home cook, chef, or foodie who wants to incorporate foraged flavors into their everyday cooking.
This guide will start with individual ingredients before going into techniques, preservation, and master recipes, making foraged food both accessible and delicious. This book is for the adventurous home cook just waiting to get started—combine new foods with familiar staples, explore wild ingredients, and bring new life and excitement to your cooking.
The Forager’s Pantry: Cooking with Wild Edibles is available at Amazon.com and Indigo.ca.
Clafoutis
Clafoutis is a marvelous French invention with a consistency somewhere between pudding and cake. It reminds me of a thick, moist pancake, and it could not be easier to make. You don’t even need a bowl, because you make it in a blender!
Clafoutis can be made with any fruit (whole berries or chunks of larger fruits) and can be served warm or at room temperature. You might top it with a little whipped cream or ice cream for dessert, and it makes a delicious breakfast eaten plain or sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar.
Yield: 1 (8 or 9-inch) clafoutis
1¼ cups milk (nut milk also works well)
½ cups sugar, divided (if your fruit is very tart, like chokeberries or gooseberries, increase this to 2⁄3 cups sugar)
3 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1⁄8 teaspoon salt
½ cup flour
2 cups fruit
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Combine the milk, half of the sugar, eggs, vanilla, salt, and flour in a blender and blend for a minute on the highest setting.
Lightly butter an 8- or 9-inch round baking dish and pour in enough batter to cover the bottom with about ¼ inch of batter. Bake for 5 minutes, or until the batter has just set but isn’t baked solid. It should jiggle—but not run—when you shake the pan.
Remove the dish from the oven, spread the fruit over the batter, then sprinkle the remaining sugar over the fruit. If you’re using large fruit, like plums or large crabapples, cut them into bite-sized pieces.
Pour the rest of the batter over the fruit and return the baking dish to the oven.
Bake for 45–55 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean and the clafoutis is golden brown.
Clafoutis is a dessert for people who say they don’t like desserts. (They’re not fooling anyone. Everyone likes dessert.) The simple baked custard surrounds fresh fruit, yet doesn’t overwhelm it with sweetness.
Recipe reprinted with permission from Gibbs Smith.