Go Back

Lime-Shiso Cherry Clafoutis with Kinako and Black Sesame

The Japanese ingredients in this recipe, namely the kinako and fresh shiso leaves, might be hard to find unless you have a Japanese grocery store handy. Kinako is a roasted soybean powder; I’ve seen packets of it sold on Amazon.com. Black sesame seeds taste somewhat nuttier to me than normal white sesame seeds (could it just be my imagination?). Shiso leaves are a Japanese leafy herb that tastes warm, a little sharp, and a tad astringent; the only comparison I can think of is cilantro, but I suspect even cilantro-haters could love shiso. If you can’t get access to any of these ingredients, feel free to cut out the shiso leaves, kinako, and black sesame seeds and make a normal (and very delicious) cherry clafoutis. Adapted from John Thorne’s Outlaw Cook
Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Ingredients
  

  • 12 oz. cherries pitted or unpitted
  • Zest from 2.5 small limes
  • 5 fresh shiso leaves chopped finely into ribbons (the easiest way is to stack the shiso leaves on top of each other and roll them into a thin cylinder, and then slice)
  • 9 tbsp. ultrafine sugar if you don’t have any, process some granulated sugar in a food processor, or, ideally, a clean coffee grinder
  • 1/2 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 tsp. salt
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 cup milk
  • 1 tablespoon unsalted butter plus 1/2 tbsp. unsalted butter for greasing the pan or pie plate
  • 1 tbsp. kinako roasted soybean powder, which you can easily find in Japanese markets or online
  • 1 tbsp. roasted black sesame seeds easily found in Japanese markets
  • Confectioner’s sugar for dusting
  • 1 cup yogurt low-fat is ok

Instructions
 

  • Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Wash and prepare the cherries, which should be stemmed and, if desired, pitted.
  • Very generously butter a 10-inch baking dish (such as a pie pan) with 1 tablespoon butter and your fingers, making sure to butter at least 2/3 of the way up the sides of the baking dish.
  • Make lime-shiso sugar by mixing the lime zest with sugar and shiso leaves on a chopping board. Incorporate the zest and shiso with the sugar by chopping the mixture until the shiso and lime look finely minced with the sugar. Set aside.
  • In a large bowl (one with a pouring spout makes things easier), sift together the flour and salt. In a small bowl, beat the eggs gently and whisk in the milk. (A whisk is really necessary here to wholly incorporate the flour and break up any lumps. I used a fork at first, but quickly realized the necessity of a whisk). Add the wet to the dry ingredients a little at a time, whisking until smooth. Stir in 3 tbsp. of the the lime-shiso sugar. You should see little bits of shiso leaf and lime zest rise to the surface. Let the batter rest while the fruit is being cooked.
  • Measure out an additional 3 tbsp. of the lime-shiso sugar into a small bowl and mix with 1 tbsp. of kinako (roasted soybean powder) and 1 tbsp. black sesame seed. Set aside.
  • In another small bowl, mix the remaining lime-shiso sugar, to taste, with the 1 cup of yogurt. (Try adding about half the lime-shiso sugar to the yogurt, and then increasing the amount until you like the flavor.). Refrigerate the lime-shiso yogurt mixture until serving time.
  • In a 10-inch skillet or saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat, coating the bottom and sides of the skillet. When the butter is bubbling, add the cherries. Stir gently (or gently move pan in circular motion) until each cherry has softened and is coated with butter, about 2 to 3 minutes. Then, sprinkle in the kinako-black sesame-lime-shiso sugar mixture. As the kinako sugar mixture melts and absorbs the butter and little bit of cherry juice produced during the cooking process, stir the mixture until the cherries get covered in the sugar mixture. The cherries will look a little dull from the kinako coating; that is perfectly normal. After about 2 minutes, the kinako coating should have largely adhered to the cherries.
  • Gently pour the cooked cherries into the buttered baking dish. Shift the baking dish in small circular motions as needed to distribute the cherries evenly. Stir up the batter that you made earlier, and scrape it carefully over the cherries. Shift the baking dish as necessary to settle the cherries into their final baking positions.
  • Put the baking dish into the oven to bake for about 20 minutes. By the end of the baking process, the clafoutis will be set, golden brown, and puffed up at the edges. (If you have a glass oven window and are an obsessive oven watcher, like me, don’t fret that the clafoutis doesn’t puff up immediately – it will do so only toward the end of baking.) Remove the clafoutis from the oven and divide into bowls or plates, sift a little confectioner’s sugar over each, and top if you like with a spoonful of the lime-shiso yogurt.

Notes

I think leaving the cherries unpitted preserves the integrity of the fruit, minimizes bleeding into the batter, and is more aesthetically pleasing. It’s a bit more inconvenient to spit out the pits, but I don’t really mind.