Clafoutis

Apricot clafoutis.

Clafoutis is a dessert for the all too brief cherry season. I make it about once a week when we have cherries, and all the traditional workers restaurants serve it. It’s a home baking classic here, not something that you buy at the patisserie. 

Mixing the batter.

It is a sort of riff on the Dutch Baby style of thick puffy pancake. It's really a pancake batter with fruit in it and baked in the oven. I habitually spiff it up a bit by replacing some of the flour with almond meal.

Individual clafoutis ready for the oven, in old paté dishes.

Clafoutis is a dialect word from central France, dating to the middle of the 9th century. It's a contraction of the old French claufir(from the Latin clavo figere, which translates as 'to fix with nails' (because the batter is studded with cherries, like a hobnailed boot). It's also derived from the word foutre, in the sense of 'to stuff full'.

Individual clafoutis in old ceramic pâté dishes.

The original recipe for this cake (in the Limousin, where it comes from, it is referred to as a gâteau) is a type of thick batter poured on the black sour cherries known as griottes noires du Limousin (ie a type of Morello cherry). Here in the Loire Valley, we have adopted the clafoutis as our own, but we use a different sort of sour cherry, one which is ruby skinned and yellow fleshed, known as a uigne. I have four guigniers (sour cherry trees) in my orchard, which is one reason why I make a lot of clafoutis. 

Made in a quiche dish, with sour cherries from my orchard and fresh out of the oven.

Once upon a time it was cooked in the bread oven, after the bread was baked [see my post on bread ovens for the history of this practice]. The cherries are traditionally not stoned because to do so would result in the loss of a great deal of juice during cooking. The stones also enhance the flavour, by boosting the cherry flavour and adding a woody note. A good clafoutisrises during cooking, but inevitably drops once cool.

The quantity in the recipe fits perfectly in a standard 24 cm ceramic quiche dish.

The aim is to contrast the creamy batter and the juicy cherries. These days you can get all creative and make savoury clafoutis, with tomatoes, peas, carrots or fennel. Nevertheless, a cherry flavoured clafoutis remains a must during the French summertime. 

Flour made from locally grown wheat. Christophe Chaussé is a craft miller operating the last traditional family run windmill in Indre (Berry).

 The basic ingredients are flour, eggs, sugar, milk, fruit and if you like, a dash of eau-de-vie de cerises. It's quick and easy to prepare, often traditionally using the windfall cherries, and is best eaten warm.

Sour cherries (left) and sweet cherries (right) picked in my orchard.

 Another speciality of the Limousin, the flognarde, is a winter version, with the batter poured over apples, pears, dried fruit or nuts. One of Brittany’s classic desserts is Far Breton, basically clafoutis with prunes. The tartouillat from Burgundy and the millard from the Auvergne are both dishes made from flour, eggs, sugar, milk and cherries, bearing a remarkable resemblance to clafoutis. In the Loire Valley, and other parts of France it is very common to make a variant with the small yellow plums called mirabelles, which are only slightly larger than cherries. Lots of people (including me) also make it with sweet cherries, but Grandma probably tuts at this sort of behaviour.

Lait ribot (buttermilk).

Recipe for Clafoutis 

Ingredients:
Butter, to grease the dish/es
50 g plain flour
50 g almond meal
2 eggs
100 g castor sugar
250 ml milk or buttermilk (Fr. lait ribot)
300g cherries, washed, stems removed

Method
1. Turn the oven to 180°C and set your baking dish or dishes on a baking tray. You can make one large clafoutis, round (eg in a quiche dish) or retangular (eg in a gratin dish), or 3 - 4 individual clafoutis (eg in souffle dishes).
2. Butter the dish/es.
3. Put flour, almond meal, eggs, sugar and milk into a tall jug and mix to a batter with a stick blender.
4. Pour the batter into your prepared dish/es.
5. Drop the cherries on top.
6. Cook for 30-40 minutes.
Can be frozen and gently reheated in a very low oven .

Mirabelle clafoutis (mirabelles are small plums).

Sour cherries from my orchard, destemmed and washed, ready for clafoutis.

Unlike the Limousin griottes, Tourangelle sour cherries are pale fleshed and red skinned, and known locally as guignes.

 

Yum

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Biodiversity and Buddhists

On Tuesday 22 June I accompanied Christian on my second visit to La Gendronnière, the Buddhist retreat, where we are conducting a biodiversity survey. Here are some photos I took on the day.

Female Stag Beetle Lucanus cervus (Fr. Biche-volant).

Mating longhorn beetles Cerambyx scopolii (Fr. le Petit capricorne).

Broad-bodied Chaser Libellula depressa (Fr. La Libellule déprimée).

Female Purple Hairstreak Neozephyrus quercus (Fr. Thécla des chênes).

Female Purple Hairstreak. After not having seen one for ten years, this is the second I saw in three days.

Marbled Fritillary Brenthis daphne (Fr. Nacré de la ronce).

Marbled White Melanargia galathea (Fr. Demi-deuil).

Betony Stachys officinalis (Fr. Épiaire officinale).

 

A Refurbished Pyramide

Anyone who has driven through the Forest of Loches will have seen these forest markers, built in the 1770s. This is the Pyramide de Saint-Quentin  on the road between Loches and Bleré (here), which has recently had some work done. If you click on the link you will see what it looked like before the work.

Last Time We Went Away

Twelve months ago we took Célestine to the Charente-Maritime and stayed with our friends Roddy and Susan. These are a few photos we haven't yet shared.

 

Arable Weeds Botany Outing at Seligny

A very pleasant in terms of company and species seen outing was led by my redoubtable friend Jean into the fields and woods around the village where he lives on 19 June 2021. The weather was distinctly iffy, but Jean claims to have a hotline to the weather goddess and whilst we did get a little wet and wind blown and have to leg it for the cars at one point, we were blissfully unaware that at the very same moment Saint Nicolas de Bourgeuil was being hit by a tornado and lost its church roof and spire. Very dramatic stuff for the usually mild and temperate Loire Valley.

Here are some photos I took on our outing, which focused on the annual weeds that grow in crops. Many of these plants are now uncommon, due to modern farming methods. In English these species are referred to as arable weeds, and in French they are les plantes messicoles. 

After rain stopped play in the wheat field we retreated to the cars, then checked out the roadside, and a track into the woodlands.

An organic wheat field, where there is no treatment applied to prevent annual weeds germinating.

Male Common Earwig Forficula auricularia (Fr. Forficule) on a wheat ear.

Large Venus's Looking Glass Legousia speculum-veneris (Fr. Miroir de Vénus), growing amongst the wheat in rather sandy soil.

Deptford Pink Dianthus armeria (Fr. Oeillet velu), growing on the roadside, not uncommon, but localised.

Crownvetch Securigera varia (Fr. Coronille changeante), abundant on many roadsides.

Corinne and Michel botanising in a roadside ditch.

Ruddy Clover Trifolium rubens (Fr. Trèfle rougeâtre), an uncommon species, growing abundantly along a short section of roadside.

Cryptocephala vittatus (Fr. Cryptocéphale rayé).

Bird's Nest Orchid Neottia nidus-avis (Fr. Néottie nid d'oiseau), one of about ten flower spikes in a small group of trees. Last year there were about fifty flower spikes, according to Jean.

Male Purple Hairstreak Neozephyrus quercus (Fr. Thécla du Chêne) on leaf litter. This species is not strictly speaking rare, but it is rarely seen (only my second time, and last time was exactly ten years ago).

Male Purple Hairstreak. To get this view of the upperside is very unusual. Its forewings were folded over oddly. I suspect it had got wet and couldn't fly until it dried out, or was newly hatched.

Operation Bee Rescue

Last Saturday I popped over to my friends John and Alice's to scrounge some grape leaves to make dolmades. They are stuck in London due to Covid19 and Brexit, so their house here has been unoccupied for some time. And my grape vines got badly hit by frost in April and don't have a good supply of palm sized leaves, whereas the vine at John and Alice's was protected by the building it is trained along.

Bernard and Brigitte prepare to open the window in order to lift the shutter latch.

 

Once I got there I immediately noticed that a colony of feral honey bees had installed themselves behind one of the ground floor shutters. I emailed John and Alice to tell them and ask if they wanted me to organise an apiarist to come and remove them. Alice rang the next day and told me their cleaner Marie-Helene had arranged for a swarm or colony to be removed only about a month ago! 

The colony revealed.

Unfortunately this is what can happen, as new swarms or colonies of bees are attracted to the smell of the wax once it is there. Marie-Helene is currently very busy with family matters so everyone was very grateful I was perfectly happy to organise the removal of the current lot of bees. I immediately rang my beekeeping friend Bernard and organised him to come over, then I rang Marie-Helene to say I was coming over to pick up the key to John and Alice's.

Brigitte sprays the colony with water, which helps to prevent them from flying.

Bernard and his wife Brigitte came over to John and Alice's on Monday evening and we removed the bees. It took 3 hours to round them all up. 

Bernard carefully cuts away a sheet of honeycomb.

 

Bernard said he had never encountered such placid bees before. Nobody got stung and they didn't get too frenzied. Some of them legged it up the wall and hid under the gutter and we couldn't reach them. Some of them got into the house -- inevitable, but I think we did fairly well at preventing it. To open the shutter we had to open the window to access the hook but it was done quickly so not too many bees came in. Brigitte and I picked them up individually and chucked them out at the end, but John and Alice will probably find a few dead bodies when they finally arrive back. Any bees trapped indoors will die within days with no food of course.

Carefully transferring a sheet of wax comb to a frame.

 

A small group of returning foragers escaped the roundup. Bernard says they are not enough to form a new colony and will either die or push off to rejoin their original colony. They will all be foragers, who are the oldest members of the colony so they don't have long to live anyway.

  

Carefully brushing the bees clinging to the wax comb into their new hive.

 

Bernard says the window and stone surround will need to be cleaned to take away all traces of wax. Otherwise passing bee scouts will smell it and another swarm will move in. He says there are wax dissolving products you can buy. I've asked the neighbours to keep an eye on developments until John and Alice get here and at the first sign of a swarm I can get Bernard back. They may have to block up the gaps with rags or something too if they are going to be absent in May and June in the future when the swarms are looking for new homes.

Carefully arranging the wax honeycomb onto a frame so the bees and their handiwork can just be slotted in to a hive box.

Bernard says the bees we rescued are the Buckfast variety, which are famously mild mannered. We never saw the queen so it's possible we didn't get her. But to be honest I don't know how we could have missed her. I think she must have been hidden in a group of bees protecting her on one of the inner combs. Bernard says that it is not guaranteed that the colony will survive in their new hive. We'll need to wait a few days to see how they go. He's hoping they will though because they were so temperamentally good.

The relocation was done by Bernard first carefully slicing off each layer of comb. The bigger sheets were laid on hive frames and will remain with the colony. Smaller bits will get the honey extracted and then be melted down to form new frames. There were some brood cells right in the middle layer, so that sheet went into their new hive. We tasted some of the honey and it was really delicious and rather unusual in flavour. We can't work out what they've been foraging on.

 

Bernard carefully brushes the remaining bees into a box after all the honeycomb has been removed.

Then Bernard sucked up the remaining bees with a vacuum arrangement connected to a hive. 

 

Bees are tipped into their new hive.

Bernard and Brigitte are the nicest people. Bernard was saying that when he was a young man he lived opposite the church in the village and had a vegetable garden next to the cemetery. When he retired his children gave him 3 bee hives. Now he has a hundred and is totally hooked.

Finally, Bernard vacuums up the last bees.

So, all good here and we all had a really fun evening together.

Walnuts in the Touraine Loire Valley

The Touraine Loire Valley is famous for its walnuts (Fr. les noix), although it does not hold an AOC for them as some other regions such as Dordogne do. Still, there is a walnut tree in almost every field and along roadsides. There is no real need to possess your own walnut to secure a year round supply – just go for a walk in October and pick them up off the ground – everyone does it.

Homemade granola.

 

There was an elderly man who used to come to the market in Preuilly. He sold the excess of whatever he was growing in his garden, and I sometimes bought lettuce, onions, garlic or potatoes from him. Although I have my own walnut trees, I sometimes also bought walnuts, and the reason is that I could buy this season's freshly shelled nuts from him. I could also buy unshelled walnuts from him, but since 1kg of unshelled or 500g of shelled is the same number of nuts and the same price it seemed mad to buy the unshelled. According to him, there are 40 walnuts to a kilo, and they net you une livre (a pound) of shelled nuts. He charged €3 a bag, shelled or unshelled. He always refers to half a kilo as une livre, and recommends the nuts as a nibble to go with an aperitif.

Homegrown walnuts.

 

Shelling the autumn crop of walnuts is a winter task, done in front of the fire. I normally freeze shelled walnuts so they don't go rancid, and use them over the course of the year until the next harvest comes in. I make my own granola to use up the last of the previous years walnuts in the freezer.
One of the most traditional ways of using walnuts here is in walnut bread. Very few people make it at home, but it is regularly available at the boulangerie, especially during foie gras season, as it can be used as an alternative to brioche to serve with foie gras.

Goats cheese, walnuts and rosemary, ingredients for savoury biscotti.

 

Every few years I make liqueur de noix. This is what the Italians call nocino and many people know it by that name, not realising that the French make it too. For this I need a couple of dozen green walnuts. Traditionally they are harvested in mid- to late June, around Saint John's Day, which is today. You have to catch the fruit before the nutshell inside has got woody. The green fruits are fairly tough all the same, and you have to hack them to bits with a cleaver.

Green walnuts for homemade liqueur.

 

Liqueur de noix is an infusion of chopped up green walnuts in vodka with sugar, spices and lemon zest. Walnuts contain a strong dye which reacts with the air to stain yellow and then progressively darker and darker until it is a very dark brown. Most instructions for making liqueur de noix carry on alarmingly about how the walnut juice will permanently stain everything it touches, but my experience is that if you just wash everything immediately after making the concoction, there isn't a problem. Cherries are much worse in my opinion, in terms of staining your fingers, clothing and spraying the wall with juice that doesn't come off paintwork.
 

Homemade pear and walnut cake, served with Pineau de Charentes.

Homemade savoury biscotti with walnuts and Sainte Maure de Touraine goats cheese.

Homemade walnut liqueur on Day 6.

At first, it's a pleasant enough looking brew...but after 24 hours the chemical reaction causing the dark colour is well under way. After three days it looks like you are habouring some sort of nuclear waste product, with the green walnut skins glowing lime green through the British racing green of the liquid.
By Christmas time it can be filtered and put in bottles ready for consumption. The longer you let it mature the smoother it becomes. Depending on your walnuts it will be more or less nutty, often with a touch of bitterness. It goes well on vanilla ice cream and I often use it in any recipe I think is robust enough to take it, where the original recipe calls for amaretto.

Walnuts are normally gathered after they fall naturally to the ground. There is a walnut in the centre of this picture, which gives you a good idea of how camouflaged they can be.

 

Another use for walnuts I like is to make savoury biscuits. We anglophones tend to think of biscotti as an Italian classic, but actually these hard crisp biscuits exist in other European culinary traditions too. In France they are called croquets or croquants by people in conversation and by artisan bakers, although in the supermarket they will often be labelled 'biscotti'. A friend made some to hand round after a botany outing. She was bemused by me apparently suddenly switching from French to Italian, and told me the biscuits were called croquants.

Homegrown green walnuts, chopped up for making liqueur.

 

The recipe below is my savoury take on the subject, using local Loire Valley (tourangeaux) ingredients.

 

Savoury Goats Cheese and Walnut Biscotti (Croquants au chèvre et aux noix)
Ingredients
125 g walnuts
2¼ cups flour
60 g mature dry goats cheese
¼ cup maize meal or polenta
1 tbsp sugar
1½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1½ tsp salt
¼ tsp piment d'Espelette
2 eggs
150 ml buttermilk
1 tbsp fresh thyme or rosemary leaves

Method
    1. Turn the oven on to 180°C.
    2. Roast the nuts in the oven for about 8 minutes.
    3. Grate, crumble or chop the cheese, depending on its consistency.
    4. Remove the nuts from the oven and allow to cool. Leave the oven on.
    5. Mix together the flour, cheese, maize meal, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt and piment d'Espelette.
    6. Roughly chop the walnuts and add to the dry ingredient mix.
    7. In a separate bowl beat the eggs with the buttermilk and thyme.
    8. Pour the wet mixture into a well in the dry mixture and work it with a fork and then your hands until it forms a fairly stiff dough.
    9. Divide into 4.
    10. Roll each quarter into a sausage about 25 cm long and put on an oven tray lined with a silicone sheet or baking paper. If it is a bit sticky, sprinkle the work surface with a little flour. Space the logs about 10 cm apart and use two trays.
    11. Bake for 20  minutes, then remove and cool for a couple of minutes.
    12. Turn the oven down to 100°C.
    13. Using a bread knife, cut the logs into slices. Angle the knife diagonally to get long oval slices.
    14. Put the slices back on the lined oven trays and put back in the oven for 30-40 minutes.

• Piment d'Espelette is a mild chilli powder from the Pyrenees. It's expensive and not available everywhere, so use hot paprika instead if you want.  
• If buttermilk (lait ribot or lait fermenté in France) isn't available where you are, use plain yoghurt.
• The biscotti will not be as brittle as the classic sweet version, because of the cheese. They are very savoury and moreish though.

The last walnut hangs on in November in our orchard.

 

Some people gather as many walnuts as they can, so they can take them to the huilerie where they will get them pressed into oil. One of my neighbours tells me it costs a couple of euros per litre to have them pressed, but unless you have a minimum of 40 kg of nuts, you have to share a pressing with other small scale clients and the output is divided up proportionally. Apparently they will also make oil from your hazelnuts, and you can buy oil from them for a few euros a litre (less than half the price of buying it from the supermarket, where it is about €12 a litre).

There are seriously walnut trees absolutely everywhere here.

Sometimes I get some of this 'homegrown' oil given to me, bottled in recycled plastic water bottles, and so strongly flavoured that it completely overpowers any salad it dresses. It's great for flavouring cakes though, so it doesn't go to waste. 

Homemade walnut liqueur.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. You may also like to check out our YouTube channel.