How to Make Cherry Clafoutis

Video guide to cherry clafoutis

Tasty cherry clafoutis recipe

I’m Rowley Leigh, I’m the chef of Le Café Anglais here in Bayswater and I’m going to make a dish called clafoutis and we’re going to make it with these beautiful Spanish Picota cherries, which you can see they’re very bulbous, very sweet.

How to get your cherry clafoutis off to a good start

We’re starting off with some butter, adding the cherries, little bit of cinnamon for seasoning and I’m going to stew them for about 10 minutes to render out some of that fantastic purpley juice. The rest of my ingredients, I’ve got 3 whole eggs, separated, sugar, flour and crème.

It’s terribly important that we get plenty of air into this batter. It’s very simple; you keep going until they turn white. We’re now going to add 50g of flour and then I’ve got 100mls of double crème.

In a separate bowl I’m going to beat the egg whites. It’s got that comfort factor of a nice baked pudding but it’s really airy and light and the flavour of the cherries just comes all the way through. And it’s always my favourite cherry dish, this. And bingo, that’s the first stage.

Adding the cherries to your cherry clafoutis

So there we have the beaten egg white, as you can see, very stiff. I beat a little bit of that into the batter so now you’ve got the 2 mixtures together you very gently just bring the mixture up from the bottom you don’t over mix it. And here’s the cherries that we cooked earlier. Just fold the mixture in over the top. Okay, there we go, that’s the finished mixture and in 15 minutes we’re going to have a little bit of cherry heaven all the way from Spain.

What is a Picota cherry?

So while that little beauty’s cooking, let me just tell you these cherries are very special. They only come for 6 weeks in June and July and they grow in this area 200 kilometres west of Madrid in this area of the Jerte valley up in the hills where they get a lot of night cooling, which means they come much later in the season than other European cherries.

How to dust and garnish your cherry clafoutis

There we go, a little dusting of icing sugar. And of course we’ve got to have a garnish. And what better garnish could there be than one Picota cherry. There we are. So I think they’re going to enjoy that. Grab the opportunity to make this dish and other dishes with Picota cherries because they are truly special.