Odesa’s best canelé

Running a coffee shop in war is a Herculean challenge. But in his Odesa cafe, Kostya still wants to make everything which he sells the best it can possibly be.

Kostya had never been to Bordeaux - but in his small coffee shop in Odesa, southern Ukraine, he spent months perfecting the art of canelé. He had asked me to send him some recipes to study, and watched many videos on YouTube to get the general idea.

Last autumn we brought him some from a specialist French bakery in London, and did a kind of unscientific taste test. There were a couple of other places in Odesa making canelé, and Kostya had bought a selection, cutting them up on a tray so we could taste everything and decide our favourites. We took notes.

Canelé are notoriously hard to get right. Traditionally they are baked in copper moulds lined with beeswax, which produces the deeply caramelised crunchy shell for which they are known, with an inside that is almost custardy, rich but not heavy, aromatic with rum and vanilla.

Some of the canelé we tried were too chewy, some a little bland - although all of them would be pretty good with a coffee in the afternoon. But Kostya wanted to do better: he wanted to get them absolutely right. He sent away for copper moulds by mail order from France, and bought expensive beeswax online. He threw away a lot of failed experiments until he’d worked out exactly how much wax to line the mould with and how hot the oven should be.

The small cabinet at the back of Kostya’s coffee shop - Lybly Kavu - always displayed a few different cakes, as well as the canelé, lined up on the counter like so many chess pieces. There was often a carrot loaf cake, made with ground hazelnuts in the mix and recently adorned with a jaunty swoosh of cream cheese frosting. There might be a lemon cake, cut into squat slices, reassuring in its simplicity.

And there were flans, baked in the French style, thick custard in a tart case made from a biscuity sweet shortcrust. I tried the special of the day, which had a delicious layer of hazelnut praline, while Kostya urged me to come along to a flan popup he was holding at the weekend, in another coffee shop across town. He would be making six different kinds, he explained, including one with black tahini, which he thought I would especially enjoy.

He fetched a sharp knife and cut a canelé in two, handing me half to try. It was excellent, with a superb crunch, a burnished crust and plenty of flavour inside. ‘These are great!’ I said, reaching for the other half, just to make sure. Definitely the best canelé in Odesa: clearly all those weeks of experiments had not been in vain. ‘Now I just need to sell them in more places’, Kostya said: perhaps some restaurants could be persuaded to serve them with coffee after dessert. We just needed to generate him some hype.

A few days later I arrived at the coffee shop across town for the flan popup. The streets echoed to the noise of generators, busy keeping the power on during blackout hours. The day before, Russia had launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, just as temperatures were dipping below freezing. The morning in Odesa had begun with sirens and explosions, and there had been no power for most of the day.

But life, and business carried on. Kostya had just been unpacking his boxes of flans when suddenly there was an enormously loud whooshing sound in the sky right overhead. To an untrained civilian ear, it sounded exactly like a missile. The cafe fell silent, people glanced upwards towards the sky, one girl ducked under the counter. Then someone shouted ‘it’s ours! No need to worry, it’s ours!’ There was an exhaled sigh of communal relief, as another aircraft whooshed over, on its way to take out a Russian reconnaissance drone which was mapping the port for a missile strike.

I bought a slice of the black sesame flan, and ate it with my coffee while I waited for my friend to arrive, the unnerving sound of the fighter jet replaying itself in my head.

Later that afternoon the Russian Iskanders flew towards the city, with a series of dull thuds as air defence found their target. You could barely hear it over the noise of the generators, chugging and whirring in their pavement cages. They were loud enough to drown out the sound of traffic and explosions, birdsong, the laughter of children, the tinny music playing through your knock-off earbuds: loud enough to cancel any distracting thoughts or daydreams.

I could feel something in my coat pocket, though, squashed between the battery operated torch and the extra power bank. It was the other half of Kostya’s canelé, wrapped in a napkin, its crust still crunchy with that deep, dark caramel which saved it from being too sweet. It was comforting, and it was perfect.