Shelf5

Exploring vegan, vegetarian and sustainable cooking

Rhubarb flaugnarde (clafoutis)

Source: Baked The Blog

It’s rhubarb season in Ontario, so I was once again looking for new rhubarb recipes. In the past, I’ve posted about a rhubarb tart with pastry cream, rhubarb compote and rhubarb muffins. There are countless recipes on the internet for rhubarb pies and crumbles, but I wanted something different. The idea of a rhubarb clafoutis came up… does that exist? Is it possible?

First, it’s worth noting that a clafoutis is only a clafoutis if made with cherries (and they should still have their pits to impart extra flavour).

If you use a different fruit, the flan-like dessert takes the more generic name flaugnarde (sometimes spelled flognarde).

Flaugnarde is commonly made with apples, pears, peaches, plums and berries. Really, any fruit will work, and people have also made it with rhubarb. So I started comparing a few rhubarb flaugnarde recipes, and I settled on this recipe from Baked The Blog.

I did make a few substitutions:

  • Instead of coconut milk, I used dairy for a more neutral flavour, combining 1 cup whole milk and 3/4 cup heavy cream for richness (although whole milk is traditional for a flaugnarde).
  • While the recipe calls for raw or turbinado sugar, the blog post talks about making lilac sugar from granulated sugar; I used granulated sugar (by weight, 50g) in the custard mixture to ensure it dissolved, but tossed the rhubarb in raw sugar and sprinkled raw sugar over the flaugnarde before baking.

The result: amazing! The custard is firm but tender and not too sweet. It’s the perfect background to hero the tangy rhubarb. I will keep this in my recipe collection for an easy but impressive dessert that could be used for any fruit (but especially rhubarb).

P.S. The flaugnarde puffs up quite a bit while baking, so ensure you use a deep baking dish, or place the dish on a baking sheet to catch any fruit that might get pushed off.

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