“What makes the desert beautiful,” said the Little Prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novel, “is that somewhere it hides a well.” It’s one of the few lines I can recall from reading the book in school. Something about it made me dream. An oasis, hidden within the sandy dunes of the desert, is the perfect metaphor for hope and possibility.
I thought of this quote when I first tasted the baked Alaska. It came to the table roaring with flames. I watched the meringue slowly darken and flambé under its fiery halo. But while its entrance was grand, the dessert turned out to be rather bland.
“It pretty much just tastes like sponge cake and ice cream,” my dining companion said. She dispelled the fantasy as I took my first bite. But I wasn’t content to let that be. The promise of fire and ice holds so much potential, I thought. I was determined to find a way to carry these flavors beyond the baked Alaska’s surface. For weeks, I approached this challenge like a Rubik’s cube, shifting blocks to try to match up the pieces.
I began to research how food scientists made hot ice cream. Reading volumes of experiments, I learned how to use food gums and hydrocolloids with unpronounceable names. The bizarre, foreign ingredients in molecular gastronomy had always intrigued but intimidated me.
Finally, I took a step back. I was focusing on the science rather than the taste. I had forgotten that certain ingredients naturally “taste” like a temperature. Mint feels cooling to the throat even after being steeped in hot water for tea. Chile pepper flakes add heat to a cold salad. And the beauty of these ingredients is that not one of them was manufactured in a lab.
With four flavors of ice cream and sorbet—green apple Calvados, caramel, smoked cinnamon, and vanilla—I constructed the flavors of my baked Alaska. I toasted salted-butter cookies to coat the bottom and sides. When I was done, I shared my creation with my team. “It tastes like a warm apple pie à la mode,” one person said. Of course, the dessert wasn’t served warm, but I understood exactly what she meant.
We’re taught in this world that nothing worthwhile comes easily, and so we often assume that the difficult path is the right one. But as I struggled to improve the baked Alaska, I realized that to make something better, you don’t always have to rip it apart. Instead, if you identify the right tweaks, you can effect great change with the smallest gesture. You just have to wander in a desert for a while to find an oasis.
I once heard a story about astronauts, which may or may not be true. Up in space, they struggled to write with ballpoint pens, which no longer worked without gravity to pull down the ink. Engineers started to develop specialized space pens that were pressurized chambers and could write on ceilings on earth, too. But the simpler solution, of course, was just to use a pencil.