This chapter addresses fruit, the most important ingredient in my arsenal. Remember, sweet stuff is still food. It needs to be seasoned and cared for; its traits must be championed. Fruit above all must look gushingly embarrassed and red-faced in its plump ripeness. Take care in seeking out the best of the season and your desserts will be wildly flavorful and simple in the absolute best way.
Create a relationship with your local greenmarket. Go and talk to the farmers. Bring them a breakfast taco and a cup of coffee. Befriend them, because they are going to have fruits and vegetables that blow the normal supermarket commodity produce out of the water. Yes, they will be a little more expensive, but you get what you pay for when it comes to fruit. A greenmarket peach in August, warmed by the sun, just picked from the branch, maybe already with a bad spot and having never seen the inside of a refrigerator . . . it body slams even the most tawdry Whole Foods supermodel fruit. The difference is monumental, huge, biblical.
Treat your fruit with respect, coax it rather than manipulate it, and you will reap endless rewards. And don’t forget to eat tons of fresh raw fruit. An apple a day . . . that’s not a joke.
GREENMARKETS: FOR GOOD AND TERRIBLE
I love greenmarkets. I have a devotion to them that is so deep it’s probably killed—or at least maimed—a couple of my relationships.
I started going to greenmarkets long before I ever cooked professionally. The Sunday Dupont Circle market in Washington, DC, was an early favorite. But I was such an amateur back then. I’d truck those plastic bags of pristine mesclun mix and Italian prune plums with fluorescent yellow flesh back to my apartment in Mount Pleasant and let it all rot in the crisper. Oh, how uncrisp that stuff would be by Thursday. But when I started working in local restaurants, my visits to the Dupont market became far more serious. I arrived before anyone else, assuring myself the pick of the fruit litter. It was my mandate—I refused to disappoint my guests. I had to have better produce than everyone else. It wasn’t a competition or anything, except that it was absolutely a competition. I’d buy my fruits and vegetables for the week on Sunday, walk them two blocks over to Komi on P Street, unlock the closed restaurant, and lay everything out like jewels on parchment-covered sheet pans.
When I moved to Los Angeles years later, I logged many hours at both the Santa Monica and the Hollywood greenmarkets. Sometimes I was there for work, sometimes for fun. The Hollywood market forms a + shape on Ivar Avenue between Sunset and Hollywood, right by Amoeba Music. Ivar is all stellar produce, increasing in perfection as you travel north. Selma Avenue spears the intersection but is full of delicious prepared foods: pupusas, kettle corn, tacos, ice cream, and more. The macho chef types in LA (male and female alike) will tell you that the Santa Monica market kicks Hollywood’s ass, but I prefer Hollywood. It’s like a Sunday morning party.
When I went to Northern California on vacation a few years ago, I built my schedule around being able to attend the Ferry Building market in San Francisco, where I could get the absolutely killer stone fruit from Frog Hollow Farm. Jesus, have you ever tasted one of their nectarines? I was reduced to a drooling cliché, standing beside the stand with juice gushing down my chin.
Being a devout fan of greenmarkets means I’m also capable of vehemently hating them. In all its posturing, the one in Manhattan’s Union Square, for example, strikes me as one of the most joyless places in the entire city. It’s infuriating. In the summer I drag myself up there and navigate the sludgy crowds nearly every day, but only because I have to.
It’s common at the Union Square greenmarket to spot a camera crew shooting a chef chatting with a farmer. Occasionally, it’s someone I know, flaunting a full sleeve of tattoos and hamming it up for the camera. He or she fondles a tomato, makes googly eyes at a crate of ramps, maybe bench-presses a flat or two of strawberries. His or her hair is perfect. It’s greenmarket chef porn, destined for a magazine spread or an online video. It cracks me up. I’m working here, for Christ’s sake. Get a room.
But in the end it’s worth it to brave the vulgarity. I learned this back in 2006, when I was doing a week-long stage at a somewhat prominent restaurant in Manhattan. “Stage” is a French term that means you work for free. But it’s usually a win-win situation: The restaurant gets some free grunt work and you, the stagier, get to hang out in the kitchen and see how they make stuff. During this particular stint, which was deep into summer, we were seeing a banner season for East Coast peaches. But the cooks at this restaurant were more concerned with technique than flavor. They’d roast a peach in shovels of butter, puree it into submission, and turn it into a pod, or a tube, or a ravioli. Sometimes they’d even peel it. Oh God, no. Please don’t peel it. Please? Oh man, all the flavor, wasted.
They had their peaches delivered from a commercial purveyor rather than walk the seven blocks to the Union Square market, where the peaches tasted better, had ideal texture, and were picked at supreme ripeness. Prematurely picked fruit festers in warehouse chillers, zapping it of all sex and juice gush. I felt sorry for the guys at that restaurant. It wasn’t a smug sort of sorry either, which as a chef I am occasionally prone to feeling. I honestly felt bad for them.
For me, a large part of the joy of cooking is witnessing the perfection of nature. These guys deprived themselves of that. And unlike that well-groomed chef hamming it up for a greenmarket photo op, I genuinely love holding a piece of fruit in its perfect state, barely able to contain its own fragile insides, a few hours away from rot. It is magic.
This recipe celebrates the beauty of hyper-in-season fruit. It exalts pockmarked skin, stems, seeds, blemishes, black spots, zits, boils, and welts. I prefer yellow nectarines (used in the recipe that follows) in the summer and Honeycrisp apples in fall. In the dead of winter, I don’t bother. In spring, I hurl myself at the season’s first apricot. All you need is a pan, an oven, some lemon juice, and some honey. There are a couple other ingredients, but they’re a bonus.
Yield: 4 servings
Nectarines (do not peel!) 4
Honey ½ cup (169 grams)
Lemon juice ½ cup (121 grams)
Salt to taste
Black pepper to taste
Fresh basil 3 leaves, torn
Turbinado sugar
1. Preheat the oven to 250°F.
2. Cut the nectarines in half, discard the pits, and place the fruit in a medium bowl.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together the honey, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Pour half of the mixture over the nectarines and fold together gently to coat. Add the remaining juice mixture and the basil and combine.
4. Arrange the nectarines in a roasting pan, cut side down, and top with the juice. Roast for 20 minutes, flip the nectarines, sprinkle with turbinado sugar, and roast an additional 20 minutes. Flip the nectarines a second time and roast until the flesh gives to the touch, 10 to 20 minutes. Let the nectarines sit in their own juices until cool to the touch.
To serve: Great alone, with a scoop of gelato (see here), or on the Grilled Lemon Pound Cake with Lemon Glaze (here).
Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of time. In those instances, use this method for fast-roasting fruit. It works beautifully with apples, cherries, and plums. It doesn’t work well for nectarines, peaches, or pineapple.
Sugar ¼ cup (50 grams)
Plums, diced 4
Salt to taste
Juice of 1 lemon
1. Set the oven to broil.
2. Dust a baking sheet with some sugar, add the diced plums, and top with more sugar and salt to taste. Drizzle the fruit evenly with the lemon juice and stir to coat completely. Broil for 1 to 2 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the plums have charred slightly.
3. Let the fruit cool on the sheet until ready to serve, and be sure to use the juices in the presentation.
To serve: This works well alone with a scoop of gelato (see here). You could also serve it with the Grilled Lemon Pound Cake with Lemon Glaze (here).
Cantaloupe at the height of the hot season is a truly beautiful thing. It drips with sweet summer juice and its fruit is primed for teeth marks. Raw and unviolated is usually the way to eat cantaloupe, but great cantaloupe is a rare and fleeting thing. A few years ago, in the off-season, I became obsessed with the dried version. I was convinced there was a way to give new life to the shriveled form.
Dried melon is typically preserved in sugar, dehydrated, packaged, and sold. I rehydrated the melon in verjus—also known as sour, unripened grape juice—and then dehydrated it a second time. This changed everything. The verjus soak stripped away the acrid sweetness and replumped the fruit into something with an unnatural but intriguing acidity. The melon became tart, like a Starburst or a pickled candy. At the restaurant we serve it with the creamy, rich, caramel-based dishes and its taste cuts through like an acidic jackhammer.
Now I soak all sorts of dried fruit in verjus: raisins, prunes, cherries. My sous-chefs scoff at my reliance on this verjus-soak method, but they eventually come around. When Kim, my current sous-chef, returned from a week-long vacation recently, she went straight for the melon candy (“I fucking missed this so much!”).
Josh, another chef, once called to say he’d found my (maxed-out) credit card on the pastry-station floor. He asked what he should do with it. Before I could answer, he said, “Don’t worry, Chef. I’ll soak it in verjus.”
Yield: 1 pound candy
Dried cantaloupe one 1-pound bag
Verjus one 750-milliliter bottle
Sugar 1 cup (200 grams)
Malic acid as needed
1. In a large bowl, add the cantaloupe and pour in the verjus. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate it for 2 days.
2. Drain the verjus and dehydrate the fruit in your dehydrator according to the manufacturer’s instructions (see here for an alternate method).
3. In a small bowl, combine the sugar and malic acid until the mixture tastes like the coating on Sour Patch Kids.
To serve: Roll the melon in the sour sugar and eat immediately, before the sugar melts.
I discovered dried plums on Houston Street in New York City in the display window of the venerable Russ & Daughters. The plums were placed beside some other, more dramatic dried stuff, looking a bit shriveled and sinewy in comparison. The reality is that they possess more hidden flavor than even those majestically glossy dried pears in the adjacent bin. They are a little more expensive than prunes, but they’re worth it. If your local stores don’t stock them, you can get them online fairly easily.
As the dried plums sit in the red wine liquid, they plump up and re-create the sensation of fresh fruit. Hit them with freshly zested orange straight from the Microplane just before serving—a blast of citrus freshness to battle scurvy.
Yield: 4 cups
Sugar 2 cups (400 grams)
Water ⅓ cup (79 grams)
Red wine one 750-milliliter bottle
Zest of 1 orange
Dried plums, chopped 4 cups (696 grams)
1. In a large saucepan over medium heat, combine the sugar and water and, using the wet-sand technique (see here), cover with a lid to create condensation, and cook until you have a light caramel.
2. When the sugar is a nice light blond, remove the pan from the heat, pour in the bottle of wine, and add the orange zest. The sugar will seize up. Return the pan to the heat and bring the mixture to a simmer over medium heat, cooking until the sugar melts again and the liquid reduces slightly, about 5 minutes.
3. Add the chopped plums and simmer until the plums have absorbed some of the cooking liquid and become engorged, about another 5 minutes—check a plum to see if the texture has changed.
4. In a large bowl, prepare an ice bath.
5. In another large bowl, add the plums and liquid and cool over the ice bath. The plums will keep in an airtight container in the refrigerator for several weeks.
To serve: Red Wine Plums go with the Spezzata di Castagne (here).
See here.
Really good tangerines seem fake. They are too tart, too sweet, too juicy, too texturally perfect. They are more sour patch kid than Sour Patch Kids, more jolly rancher than Jolly Ranchers. I would say they are nature’s candy, but that would be really dumb. It’s not far from the truth, though.
The best tangerines are extremely difficult to cook with: Why screw with something that’s perfect already? The zest alone, grated with a Microplane, is intoxicating.
At the restaurant, tangerine season is the time of ego annihilation. It comes in the dead of winter, when there’s no fresh fruit available and I’ve spent the past months manipulating ingredients like crazy—a God complex has set in. I am the chef! Look at what I can do! I’m definitely a genius! I’m filled with all sorts of empty, puffy-chested bravado. But then the really good tangerines come in season, innocently, coyly. I fall instantly in love (again, just like I did last year). And I know I have to honor them as they are. See ya later, ego.
I serve them on a bed of cracked ice in a bowl. At the table, guests peel and eat them on their own. The tangerine skin releases aromatic oils into the air and perfumes the dining room. I love how completely Italian it is. All I did was crack up some ice! I know this type of thing makes some of my peers really upset. I love that, too.
SUGARED GREEN STRAWBERRIES WITH TOASTED FENNEL CAKE, CANDIED FENNEL, AND MINT GELATO
The band Dead Kennedys are polarizing, hugely influential, and totally un-rip-offable. Singer Jello Biafra’s voice is too distinct, guitarist East Bay Ray’s guitar work too deceptively simple. The album covers are works of art. You can’t do a band that is anything like the Dead Kennedys. It’s not possible. They can’t be copied. Don’t even try. If you are in possession of the band’s first record, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, I suggest you play the first song on Side Two. This tune is also known as track 8 on your CD, or as the popular one with a German title about the Zen fascist California police state. Let us begin.
There is a restaurant in Copenhagen called Noma. I’ve never eaten there; I’ve never been to Denmark. In 2010, Noma was anointed the best restaurant in the world, which is a pretty crazy thing to wrap your head around. Best restaurant in the world? There are something like twenty-four thousand restaurants in New York City alone.
Noma is miniscule—you could fit four or five of them inside Del Posto. But the moment the best restaurant in the world thing happened, fancy restaurants of every size started ripping it off, much in the way El Bulli was targeted a few years prior. But with Noma the shtick was so specific—Nordic cuisine based on foraged ingredients found within miles of the restaurant—that any time it was aped, it was beyond comically obvious. But it went on, and on, and on. For years. The movement is actually still filtering its way down the food chain. For a long time, seeing sorrel and sea buckthorn berries on fine dining menus really pissed me off. (You can’t rip off the Dead Kennedys, man!) But then I realized I was doing it, too. I was so guilty, and I didn’t even realize it.
Noma was one of the first (if not the first) restaurants to use underripe green strawberries. They are slightly inedible raw, so Noma pickled them. Yes: genius. Chef René Redzepi at Noma finds the most perfectly not ripe strawberries and figures out how to get them on his menu. OK, that rules.
So now I do green strawberries, too. They are lightly pickled and rolled in citrus sugar. You need to eat them immediately, before the sugar melts and there’s still a crunch. I pair it with a mint gelato. The taste it leaves on your palate veers dangerously close to drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth, but it works beautifully.
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
“Copycat.”
Fennel seeds 1 tablespoon (6.5 grams)
Extra-virgin olive oil 1 tablespoon (13.5 grams)
Fennel bulb 1, cut into ½-inch cubes
Salt 2 teaspoons (8 grams)
Eggs 6, separated
Sugar 1 cup (200 grams)
Almond flour 1 cup (95.5 grams), toasted
Pistachio flour 1 cup (75 grams)
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
2. In a dry sauté pan over medium-low heat, toast the fennel seeds until they’re hot, about 1 minute. Add the olive oil, chopped fennel, and 1 teaspoon of the salt and stir. Cook until the fennel is soft and translucent, 10 to 15 minutes, and set aside to cool.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and ½ cup of the sugar and set aside.
4. In a large bowl, whisk together the egg whites and the remaining ½ cup sugar. Pour in the yolk-sugar mixture. Add the almond flour, pistachio flour, and the remaining 1 teaspoon salt and fold together gently with a rubber spatula.
5. Pour the batter onto the prepared baking sheet. Bake until set, 25 to 30 minutes. The cake will soufflé up as it bakes and then fall down as it cools (this is good).
6. Allow the cake to cool completely in the pan.
PICKLED GREEN STRAWBERRIES
Rice wine vinegar 2 cups (477 grams)
Sugar 2 teaspoons (8 grams)
Salt 2 teaspoons (8 grams)
Coriander seeds 2 teaspoons (6 grams)
Underripe green strawberries, hulled and cut in half lengthwise 2 cups (304 grams)
1. In a large bowl, whisk together the vinegar, sugar, salt, and coriander seeds until the sugar and salt are dissolved.
2. Place the hulled strawberries in a separate bowl. Pour in the sugar mixture and combine gently. Refrigerate in an airtight container for at least 2 hours—if you can wait 2 days, I recommend it.
See here.
Water 1 cup (237 grams)
Sugar ¾ cup (150 grams)
Salt to taste
Fennel bulb 1, cut into thin strips
1. In a small saucepan over high heat, bring the water, sugar, and salt to a boil. Add the fennel strips, reduce the heat to low, and cook until translucent, about 4 minutes. Set aside and let cool.
CITRUS SUGAR
Sugar ½ cup (100 grams)
Zest of 2 oranges
In a small bowl, combine the sugar and orange zest using your fingers and set aside.
SEASONED PISTACHIOS
Good-quality unsalted pistachios ½ cup (62 grams), shelled
Egg white 1 (30 grams)
Salt ½ teaspoon (2 grams)
Sugar ½ teaspoon (2 grams)
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2. In a small bowl, toss together the pistachios and egg white until the nuts are coated and sticky, but not too thickly coated. Add the salt and sugar and toss gently. Spread the nuts out evenly on a baking sheet. Bake until they have dried out, about 5 minutes.
FOR SERVING
Mint Gelato (here)
Extra-virgin olive oil
To serve: Cut out a chunk of fennel cake. Top it with a scoop of mint gelato. Garnish with strips of the candied fennel, several pickled green strawberries immediately after you’ve rolled them in citrus sugar, and a few seasoned pistachios. Drizzle with some nice extra-virgin olive oil and serve immediately.
See here.
GRILLED LEMON POUND CAKE WITH LEMON GLAZE
Don’t bother firing up the Weber for this cake. That would be ridiculous. Instead, keep the recipe in mind for when you know there’s a BBQ ahead. If it’s winter, all the better! When I was a kid, nothing jazzed me more than grilling outside when there was snow on the ground. It always felt like I was doing something illegal. I pictured neighbors peering out from behind their curtains. You can’t grill in the winter . . . you can’t do that! What does that kid think he’s doing? The nerve!
This citrus syrup–drenched lemon cake grills up especially nicely, kind of like French toast. The sugars caramelize over the flame, but the cake is sturdy enough that it doesn’t crumble apart. At Del Posto, this cake is a base for a slow-roasted nectarine, when the nectarines are at their absolute peak, near the end of summer.
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Sugar ½ cup (100 grams)
Juice from 1 orange
Juice from ½ lemon
In a small microwavable bowl, whisk together the sugar, orange juice, and lemon juice and heat in the microwave for 20 seconds. Stir the mixture until the sugar dissolves and set it aside. (If the glaze gets too hot, the flavors of the juices change; be careful.)
LEMON CAKE
Sugar 1⅓ cups (230 grams)
Almond paste ½ cup (100 grams)
Zest of 1 lemon
Zest of 1 orange
Unsalted butter ⅓ cup or ⅔ stick (75 grams), plus more for the pan
Pure vanilla extract 1 teaspoon (4 grams)
Eggs 4 (200 grams)
Cake flour ⅔ cup (86 grams)
Baking powder ½ teaspoon (2 grams)
Salt to taste
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a 12 × 4½ × 2½-inch cake pan with butter and set aside.
2. In the bowl of a stand mixer, using the paddle attachment, combine the sugar, almond paste, lemon zest, and orange zest on medium speed. Mix thoroughly, but don’t expect the mixture to come together. Add the butter and vanilla and cream together until light and fluffy.
3. Using a rubber spatula, scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the eggs, one at a time, and mix, incorporating each one fully before adding the next.
4. Into a large bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
5. Add the flour mixture to the batter and mix until everything is just incorporated; do not overmix. Remove the bowl from the stand mixer and finish mixing with a wooden spoon.
6. Pour the batter into the reserved cake pan. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted into the center of the cake.
7. Run a knife around the edge of the cake and flip it over onto a cooling rack. Place another cooling rack on top.
8. While it’s still warm, poke holes in the cake using a toothpick and pour the glaze over it through the cooling rack, which will help distribute the glaze evenly. Let the cake cool for at least 1 hour.
FOR SERVING
Slow-Roasted Fruit (here)
Basil Gelato (here)
Extra-virgin olive oil
To serve: Slice the cake into ½-inch slices and cook each piece on both sides on a hot grill for 30 seconds. Serve with slow-roasted fruit, a scoop of basil gelato, and a drizzle of olive oil.
JAMS, FRUIT SPREADS, MARMELLATA
Here are some jams, fruit spreads, and a marmellata. They are good on all sorts of things and are made with a few different techniques.
HUCK-UL-BERRY: It’s a dumb-sounding name, but these berries aren’t dumb. They are Mickey Rourke playing Charles Bukowski in Barfly. They taste a bit like dirt, the way beets do, but not quite that much dirt. They grow in the mountains but are suave and sophisticated, like a grown-up version of blueberries—like blueberries smoking a cigar. Blueberries are children who just learned to walk, cute but sheltered, bouncing around and looking for mommy. Huckleberries are teenagers from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, or downtown Baltimore, Maryland, or Whittier, California. They know what’s up.
Huckleberries freeze well. (Blueberries do not.) This recipe utilizes the frozen kind, which can still be pricey. But they are worth it in the winter months when you are sick to death of apples and pineapple. Do you have any vanilla ice cream or can you get some? Now is a good time for it.
Yield: About 2 cups
Huckleberries, frozen 2 cups (300 grams)
Sugar ½ cup plus 2 teaspoons (108 grams)
Juice of 1½ lemons
Pectin 1 teaspoon (1 gram)
Zest of 1½ lemons
Citric acid ½ teaspoon (2 grams)
Salt to taste
1. In a small saucepan over medium heat, combine the huckleberries, ½ cup of the sugar, and the juice from 1 of the lemons, and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Bring the mixture to a simmer and cook until the berries release some liquid, about 5 minutes. Strain the berries and place them in a medium bowl. Pour the juice back into the saucepan and return it to a simmer over low heat.
2. In a large bowl, prepare an ice bath.
3. In a small bowl, mix together the remaining 2 teaspoons sugar and the pectin. Add the mixture to the berry juice, stirring occasionally, until it dissolves, about 2 minutes. Add the juice of the remaining ½ lemon to thicken the berry liquid.
4. Pour the berry liquid over the reserved berries, stir, and season with lemon zest, citric acid, and salt.
5. Chill the bowl over the ice bath to stop the berries from cooking further. The marmellata will thicken as it cools. Store in an airtight container in your fridge for up to 3 days.
To serve: This goes great with the Polenta Crêpes (here). Rub one side of a crêpe with the marmellata, fold, and eat as fast as possible in one bite.
Yield: 2 cups
Strawberries 4 cups (608 grams)
Sugar 1 cup (200 grams)
Juice of 1 lemon
Salt to taste
1. Preheat the oven to 200°F. Line a baking sheet with a Silpat and set aside.
2. Remove the tops and cut the berries into irregular chunks. In a medium bowl, toss the chunks with the sugar, lemon juice, and salt.
3. Pour the berries and the juice onto the reserved baking sheet. Bake until the fruit is dehydrated slightly and the juices have turned into a sticky glaze, about 1½ hours.
4. Let the berries cool on the sheet. They will be gooey and jam-like.
To serve: Use this with the Hand-Pulled Stracciatella (here) and whatever else seems interesting. It is versatile.
Yield: 2 cups
Sugar ½ cup (100 grams)
Water ¼ cup (60 grams)
Strawberry puree (see note in Glossy Fruit Sauce), cold 2 cups (464 grams)
Salt to taste
Lemon juice to taste
1. In a small saucepan over medium-high heat, combine the sugar and water and bring the mixture to a boil without stirring (just swirl the pan). Continue cooking until the mixture becomes a light amber color, about 5 minutes.
2. Immediately add the cold strawberry puree, stir, and bring back to a boil. Adjust the consistency by cooking longer if desired.
3. Season with lemon juice and salt.
To serve: You’ll need this for Lidia’s Sweet Pea Cake with Macerated Strawberries, Strawberry Gelato, and Candied Split Peas (here).
Few things in life are truly, perfectly shiny. A brand new pair of Vans, purchased at some sketchy place on 14th Street from a salesperson unhappy with life’s trajectory—those shoes are very shiny, blindingly so. The keys to your new apartment in New York, too: really shiny. The keys you acquired by putting $7K on your girlfriend’s credit card. Jingly and musical and emitting light beams like the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Holy shit, we got it! And this sauce. Gleaming and bright. It winks at you if you look at it right. It’s all about the pectin—get to know this ingredient. It’s less scary than it sounds. Passion fruit works best, but strawberries work great, too.
Note: For 2 cups of puree, you’ll need 4 cups of fruit. For a smooth puree, pass it through a chinois or fine-mesh strainer.
Yield: 1½ cups
Fruit puree 2 cups (weight varies by fruit)
Sugar ½ cup plus 2 teaspoons (108 grams plus 8 grams)
Pectin 1 teaspoon (1 gram)
Juice of ½ lemon
Zest of 1 lemon
Citric acid ½ teaspoon (2 grams)
Salt to taste
1. In a small saucepan over low heat, bring the fruit puree and ½ cup of the sugar to a simmer.
2. In a large bowl, prepare an ice bath.
3. In a small bowl, mix together the remaining 2 teaspoons sugar and the pectin. Add the mixture to the puree, stirring occasionally, until it dissolves, about 2 minutes. Add the lemon juice to thicken the berry liquid. Season with lemon zest, citric acid, and salt.
4. Chill the bowl over the ice bath to stop the cooking. The sauce will thicken as it cools. Store in an airtight container in your fridge for up to 3 days.
Passion Fruit Gloss.
Applesauce makes me think of three things: The Brady Bunch pork chop episode, pierogi at Veselka in New York’s East Village, and my tenure as pastry sous-chef at Campanile in Los Angeles in the mid-2000s. Dahlia Narvaez, my boss there, taught me how to make it. She preferred Granny Smith apples and will frown at me for using multiple varieties. Dude, it’s gonna be brown! They are going to oxidize! Some are gonna be squishy! Did I teach you nothing?! She will have my neck in a noose for asking you to smoke it.
And she’ll be right. This sauce is just as good unsmoked, maybe even better. Equally troubling is that there are tons of sketchy ways to rig a backyard or home-kitchen smoker, none of which I will personally vouch for. But here it is anyway, the way we did it at Del Posto in a dish called crespelle d’Autunno, when I was in a phase of saying goofy things at the preservice staff meeting like, The smoked-apple puree induces the sensation of autumn, burning leaves, the scent of October, the crackling of leaves underfoot. I’m surprised (and mildly disappointed) no one walked over and drilled me right in the face.
Yield: About 3 cups
Apples, assorted varieties 6, peeled, cored, and roughly chopped
Juice of 1 lemon
Sugar ¼ cup (50 grams)
Salt to taste
Water ⅓ cup (78 grams)
Vanilla bean ½, scraped
1. In a deep-sided saucepan over low heat, stir together the apples, lemon juice, sugar, salt, water, and vanilla bean scrapings until the apples are fully coated in the sugar. Wrap the top of the pot with plastic wrap and cook for 20 to 25 minutes more, or until the apples are soft but still hold their shape. Some will break down more than others, and this is good.
2. Pour the apples into a deep pan, pop into the smoker of your choice, and smoke until the apples have a pleasant, smoky aroma. This will take 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the smoker.
3. Stir the applesauce around a bit and refrigerate in an airtight container for up to 1 week.
To serve: Smear some smoked applesauce on a plate and scatter some Candied Squash (here) around. Add a folded Buckwheat Crespelle (here) and top with a scoop of Ricotta Gelato (here). Drizzle with maple syrup and serve immediately.
See here.
BAND TOUR FOOD DIARY: BORN AGAINST
I went on tour with a band for the first time in January 1993. I had just joined Born Against on drums and was excited beyond belief. I hadn’t traveled much before then, and I was about to see most of the country in a tour van, playing shows along the way. So I did what any normal twenty-year-old punk kid would do in that situation: I kept a tour diary of the food we ate.
I kept it a big secret from everyone in the van. There were six of us squished together for four weeks, and secrets weren’t exactly easy to keep. But writing down what we ate made perfect sense to me: I was being introduced to local delicacies every twelve hours and it was exciting. We were all vegetarians, so every meal was a new regional adventure. But it was the most uncool thing I could have done. I kept it under wraps.
I logged only the food. I didn’t mention the shows, which were great, weird, and often mind-blowing. We played a living room in Atlanta, where we Sharpie-d on fake moustaches before performing to sixteen people, and Sam, our singer, called the cops to try to get the show shut down. There was a show in Dallas at an airplane hangar set up by a woman who ran a record store there called Direct Hit Records (the logo was JFK in crosshairs). And another at an abandoned storefront next to a bail bondsman in Amarillo with a band called Slit Throat. The singer was a tiny, shy girl in a hooded sweatshirt with a voice that sounded scarier than a train derailment. She went by Mary Slit, of course. None of it made it to the pages of my diary.
Instead, I scribbled about the time we cooked tortillas and peanut butter at an empty mansion in San Diego rented by twenty kids. There was no furniture, but the place had nice carpets and a gas stove. I detailed the miserable burritos we had just off I-95 in South Carolina at South of the Border amusement park (the least amusing, most casually racist amusement park in the world). I logged an entry about a meal at a vegetarian café in Pensacola, Florida, where we senselessly but happily blew all our show money from the night before: Sure, let’s get another round of soy milk coconut smoothies, hell yeah! We had perfect homemade enchiladas in Santa Fe, New Mexico, served to us by the mom of some guy we’d just met. I wrote about that, too.
I was known as The Squirrel. It’s difficult playing drums in a punk show if you’re full, so I usually skipped dinner. By midnight I was famished. I’d learned to squirrel away baked tofu packets, Odwalla juices, and Ak-Mak crackers under the van seat for after shows. Eventually my stomach became inured to the potential fallout of unrefrigerated and improperly stored food.
We had a six-dollar-a-day food allowance, and back then few parts of the country were vegetarian friendly. But Northern California—Berkeley and San Francisco, especially—was the promised land. Our collective sense of excitement on entering the Bay Area could have generated the electricity needed for the next show. Places like Springfield, Missouri, were more sobering in terms of fake meat and packaged hummus. In places like those, we’d often spend a couple hours finding the one health food store and then proceed to buy out as much of their vegetarian junk food as we could afford.
On that first tour we picked up two hitchhiker skater kids in baggy pants and gave them a ride from Phoenix to San Diego. All they had with them were a bunch of Phil Collins CDs to hock and a plastic bottle that they used to squirt salt water into Coke machines—an early nineties trick that no longer works but which used to relieve the machine of its quarters and soda cans, which they could later sell or drink. One kid had a crude jailhouse-style tattoo of serial killers’ faces across his stomach, à la Mount Rushmore. When Christina, our roadie, asked him if hitchhiking around the Southwest increased his chances of running into an actual serial killer, he looked up and without a drip of irony, said, “Oh man, it would be my honor to be murdered by a serial killer.”
One Born Against tour ended in Baltimore, near enough to my mom’s house that we went there after a show. When we arrived at about 1 a.m., there was my mom, Barbara, waiting for us with a 100 percent vegan spaghetti and red sauce spread. She sat us down at the dining room table and served us in her bathrobe. It was Sunday night and she had to work in the morning. She was the coolest mom, and her unconditional support of all the stupid band stuff I was involved in was truly selfless. That night Sam mined the fridge for (and found!) a Fresca that I swear was four years old.
I destroyed my tour food diary in the mid-nineties. I was embarrassed by it. A food diary was most certainly not punk. I wish I still had it. (Continued here.)
A version of this recipe was published in People magazine a few years ago. Why the editors asked me for a recipe and why I agreed to give them one remains a mystery. They found the most ridiculous photo of me online and printed it beside the recipe. My friend Nastassia spotted it and immediately e-mailed me a photo of the spread: “What are you, a mixologist?” Carlo, the chef at Blanca, in Brooklyn, texted me the exact same photo, with an exasperated “?????”.
There wasn’t much I could say in my defense. But there is an equal, or perhaps even greater mystery: What were they doing reading People magazine in the first place?
Note: The grappa will keep this recipe from freezing entirely, plus it will potentially inebriate you.
Yield: 4 servings
Sugar ¾ cup (150 grams)
Water 1 cup (237 grams)
Juice from 8 lemons about 1¼ cups (305 grams)
Grappa 1 cup (222 grams)
1. In a small saucepan over medium heat, combine the sugar and ½ cup of the water and simmer until the sugar dissolves, about 5 minutes. Remove the syrup from the heat and let it cool to room temperature.
2. Add the lemon juice, grappa, and the remaining ½ cup water to the cooled syrup and stir. Pour the mixture into a metal baking sheet and place it in the freezer.
3. Stir the granita every 40 minutes for about 3 hours, until it is slushy.
To serve: Scoop the granita into a frozen bowl and serve immediatel
See here.
Ladner developed this Bellini after visiting Harry’s Bar in Venice, Italy. He’d never been a fan of the classic drink of prosecco and white peach puree, but he fell in love with the version at Harry’s.
Venice is outrageously beautiful. It is also completely, ridiculously, built in water. It shouldn’t exist. Anyone who’s been there knows that the place has an amazing art scene (old stuff and weirdo modern stuff), but mostly it’s a tourist hub filled with restaurants designed to strip you of your money as fast as possible. Harry’s is no exception. It’s a lot more formal than you’d expect after a sweaty walk over a thousand footbridges, and when you order a Bellini (everyone orders a Bellini), it’s a glorified shot glass that’ll run you twenty dollars.
There are a few hard-to-get ingredients in the Del Posto version: citron vinegar (find this online), peach liqueur (this, too!), and dry ice (careful!). The result is closer to a smoothie accented with booze than a cocktail. It’s perfect for serving when you have lots of people over. In fact, Ladner’s original version was for a two-thousand-person party in Philadelphia, hence the name. The dry ice is the real hero.
Yield: 5 servings
White peach puree 4½ cups (1,000 grams), about 8 to 10 peaches
Citron vinegar ¼ cup (60 grams)
Peach liqueur ⅓ cup (80 grams)
Salt 1 teaspoon (4 grams)
Dry ice
Prosecco 1¾ cups (400 grams)
1. In a large metal bowl, combine the peach puree, citron vinegar, peach liqueur, and salt. Whisk to incorporate.
2. Fold the dry ice into a towel neatly, crush it into a powder, and add the powder to the mix. Stir until the dry ice has melted completely—it will bubble up and become slushy. Do not serve until the dry ice is all gone!
3. Add the prosecco just before serving, and whisk gently so that the carbonation remains intact.
To serve: Serve smugly in a miniature shot glass and charge a lot of money.
I love lemonade. Especially really sour lemonade, with barely any sugar in it. Ice, too. It’s one of my favorite things. One of the reasons I work in a restaurant is the unlimited availability of ice—I go through quarts of the stuff every day. Europe is aggravating on many levels, but mostly because there’s no ice. Whenever I return from Italy, my first stop is a random bodega. I buy ice. A big bag.
Nelson is a cook at Del Posto, on the risotto station at the end of the pasta line. Risotto takes time and love to prepare, and Nelson is the absolute master. His eyes move around the kitchen stealthily as he coaxes the starch out of each grain of rice mystically. Stare secretly at Nelson long enough and he’ll find your eyes—without fail. He’s always taking on special projects in the middle of his workday that a lesser cook could never manage without botching their actual job. We call one of those things Nelson Juice, and it is the most refreshing, delicious lemonade in creation. It’s almost a dessert.
Yield: Enough for you and some other people
Lemon juice 1 pint (488 grams)
Sugar ¼ cup (50 grams)
Fresh mint 5 leaves
1. In a food processor, combine the lemon juice, sugar, and mint and as many ice cubes as you can fit. Pulse until you have a slushy mess that is full of tiny pebbles of crushed ice. You might have an outlier big ass chunk of ice. That’s fine. It’s still going to be delicious. Don’t pulse it too far or you will end up with something like a 7-Eleven Slurpee. You don’t want that. Too fine. You want chunks, so it’s more like a Slush Puppie. You need to simultaneously drink and eat it.
To serve: Get this into people’s hands as quickly as possible. Sometimes Nelson puts ours in a metal bain-marie and stashes it in the walk-in, where it remains slushy for a few hours.
Ian F. Svenonius is responsible for so much great art from the past 25 years it’s difficult to wrap your head around. The inner-sleeve liner notes from his band Nation Of Ulysses’ Plays Pretty for Baby alone qualify him for American knighthood. He is an author, poet, musician, and philosopher. He lives in Washington, DC. If his current band, Chain and the Gang, is playing in your town, go.
THE HISTORIC ROLE OF SUGAR IN EMPIRE BUILDING by Ian Svenonius
As much as oil or columbite-tantalite in the modern era, sugar has historically been a diabolical commodity, the cultivation of which precipitated genocide, slavery, and ecological devastation. Not only because sugar is delicious, physically affecting, addictive, and profitable, but because whichever nation ran the sugar supply would rule the world.
What gave the sugar-sprinkled peoples of the world a historic advantage over their foes? Sweetened tea, coffee, chocolate, pastries, trifles, crumbles, and cookies assured a workforce that was more amphetamined, more delusional, and had a greater ability to endure industrial privations. Sugar eaters’ dreams were bolder and more vivid, but the complacency of these addicts was assured via strategic control of the precious treacle. Sugar was a magic potion that manufactured, out of mere mortals, a super race of psychotics, capable of stranger thoughts and grander ideas, who were less prone to moral hygiene and more capable of utter brutality.
When Europeans first discovered sugar, during the so-called Middle Ages, they recognized it as a dangerous and possibly “supernatural” material, best kept under lock and key. Sugar was the first of the “controlled substances.” It traveled north with the Arab conquest of the Middle East, north Africa, and southern Europe—the “mad” stimulant that rode on the heels of the heretic. In modern times, Muslims are characterized as austere, ascetic, and fun hating, but for a millennium they were portrayed by resentful, sweets-starved Christian Europeans as profligate, sin-loving, licentious, and effete, having scented hookahs and rugs on the walls of their harems. The Arabs spread sugarcane—Saccharum barberi—so avidly that it was said “Where the Koran goes, sugar follows.”
In seven years the Iberian Peninsula fell to the Muhammadans. It took more than seven hundred for the Christians to get it back. Why were the interlopers so intransigent? Why, in that era of fluid borders, great migrations, and topsy-turvy alliances, could Spain’s new Muslim rulers not be ousted? Because they had sugar on their side.
By the time the “Reconquest” was finally realized, the Portuguese, Spaniards, and Azoreans had mastered the cultivation of sugar, making the Muslims’ expertise redundant and their presence unnecessary. In the final year of the Reconquest, 1492, Columbus made the first of his historic voyages to the Americas—primarily to find a place to grow sugar for Spain, which he managed to do in spades. Indeed, for centuries the Americas and the Indies were a massive slave plantation utilized for the cultivation of confection. The Arabs were outmatched—the Ottoman Caliphate receded steadily on the world stage until its eventual dismemberment by European imperialists at the end of WWI.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the European colonists fought an arms race of ambrosia, which the British ultimately won, first with their invasion of Jamaica and, after the abolition of slavery, with the possession of India, where the process of crystallizing sugar was born. With the Monroe Doctrine (1823), the United States entered the contest. The end of the Spanish-American War (1898), which secured sugar-rich Cuba and Puerto Rico for the Yanquis, initiated the “American Century” of global preeminence for the United States. The annexation of Hawaii and the occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic made the United States a “sugar superpower.”
In the first world—perhaps due to the rabid insanity and addiction caused by the pastoral pre-confection—sugar became a ritual sacrament of a religious-spiritual sort, whether as a magical invocation of mythological or theological creatures (for example, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny), or as a reward for ingesting ho-hum food in the form of “dessert,” the post-meal high. Sugar, formerly the unholy destroyer of worlds, was dressed up as a bunny rabbit, candy corn, bonbon, candy cane, and used as consecration for weddings or given cutesy, infantilized titles.
The covert drugging of the world’s population over the centuries is a powerful component in the illogical insanity of the systems such as capitalism and its out-of-vogue, statist brother fascism, that have taken root since sugar’s widespread introduction.
When revolution occurred in Cuba, the country was providing America with more than one-third of its sugar market. When the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion to regain the island for American plantation owners was thwarted by communists, the reality of a sugar-free United States became something to consider.
When Lyndon Johnson was inaugurated, he allayed these fears with a corn syrup substitute that was sweeter than sugarcane and absolutely plentiful. By 1966, midway through Johnson’s presidency, sugar consumption stood on the precipice of decline, replaced by corn syrup. The sugar drought sent the empire on its mad descent, marked by calamity, total corruption, general idiocy, an epidemic of political assassination, and surrender to degeneracy. The naked cruelty of the sugar years segued into the depression and flatulence of a corn-syruped nation, to disastrous results.
Initially, corn syrup wasn’t considered a suitable alternative and social planners attempted to replace sugarcane with other narcotics. The “lifestyle revolution” promulgated by the mid-sixties drug culture—supposedly a grassroots rebellion—was their desperate attempt to mollify the public’s seething hunger for the sugar high, which was being sadistically withheld (albeit under American embargo) by the damned barbudos of Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
The CIA fed the population LSD, cocaine, peyote, marijuana, pharmaceutical pills, crystal meth, belladonna, mandrake, ayahuasca, mushrooms, airplane glue, and gave the Mafia a free hand to sell heroin—anything to placate the population and compete with the other sugar-rich economies. Drugs were ubiquitous in the sixties and post-sugar years of the seventies, promoted heavily in all media to both children (H. R. Pufnstuf, “Puff, the Magic Dragon”) and adults (Miles Davis, Playboy magazine, and so on). A “health food” craze was contrived to persuade people that sugar-free diets were “cool.” But illegal drugs, though effective as antidotes for sugar withdrawal, were problematic for mass assignation because their role for government was more prescriptive (that is, destroying radical groups and political movements, undermining class consciousness, etc.) and not intended for everyone.
The true solution was a souped-up and muscular version of corn syrup called high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). In 1977, HFCS went into heavy production as a sweetener and by 1984 had replaced cane sugar in Coca-Cola and Pepsi. HFCS led to epidemic obesity, acne, and insanity (Pepsi drinker Michael Jackson, for example). But it also sweetened more efficiently than sugar ever had, inducing a giddy, manic high in the user, usually followed by severe episodes of withdrawal marked by fatigue, depression, and nihilism.
HFCS was soon added to everything from bread and marinara sauce to beer, peanut butter, cereal, crackers, chips, lunchmeat, hamburgers, hotdogs, ketchup, pickle relish, and Miracle Whip. Even after the dissolution of Soviet power and the end of the confectionary cold war, the USA shirked the sugar that had made it great. HFCS was a heavier narcotic and American palates were now inured to the old-fashioned flavor of cane sugar. For manufacturers, HFCS was so profitable that they lobbied for a continued embargo and the political isolation of Cuba so as to effectively outlaw “the white lady.”
Still, warily, sugar started to reappear in outlaw kitchens and cupboards. Old-timers remembered the high it gave them, the illicit joys from their youth spent wandering the streets as addicts, hooked on the delightful residue of the cane plant. Mexican Cokes, still supposedly flavored with sugar, became highly sought vestiges of an underground connoisseurship, a badge of esoteric knowledge. Some chefs started producing food that utilized the arcane sweetener for a small, louche audience of culinary perverts.
Whether these new sugar users can repeat the terrifying feats of their addict forebears remains to be seen.
See here.
Born: April 4
Occupation: Chef and owner of Manresa in Los Gatos, California
Status: Longtime partner, still in love
Notable quote: “There will be a time and a place to finally leave the professional kitchen, though folks say I could or would never do it. ‘Watch me,’ I say.”
Shoe size: 11½
Lunch food: Oysters
Beverage: I’m flexible. Champagne will almost always work, though.
I Heart NY: Lived and worked there as a young man. Many memories, few regrets.
First time: There is, for everything. It is deciding whether to do it again.
Accomplishments: Still in business and can go to the beach
Ambition/Future plan: To not die in the kitchen
LES DEUX CAFES: BUILD YOUR RÉSUMÉ LIKE A PRO
In 2003, I moved from DC to Los Angeles for two reasons: to start a new band with some friends and to try to weasel my way into a pastry job at Campanile. Nancy Silverton was still in charge there, and as a newly minted pastry jerk, I just had to work there. Nancy was my idol. I had all her books. I eventually did log some time working under her, but not before doing time at a signless joint with a silly French name on a block just south of Hollywood Boulevard.
Les Deux Cafes had expired as a celebrity nightclub, and its restaurant was completely inconsequential. I can tell when I am in a serious, professional kitchen, because it always smells good, no matter if there’s farty tripe bubbling away in a pot, whole pigs broken down into little chunks on the countertop, or plastic containers brimming with prepped onions. At least 95 percent of the time hotel kitchens smell like a hospital cafeteria. It’s a smell that clings to you—your nostrils, your clothes, your shitty paper toque. It is gross and demoralizing to everyone involved. The kitchen at Les Deux Cafes did not smell good. Of my closely guarded and checkered employment history, rife with embarrassing résumé entries, this is a particularly nasty blight.
They didn’t need a pastry chef. None of the patrons ate the food, and certainly not the desserts. But they paid me handsomely to act like a pastry chef, so goddamnit, I acted away. It was fine with me, since it afforded me plenty of free time to practice and record with Wrangler Brutes, my new band. I could work two hours a day or twelve, depending on my band schedule or mood. That part was cool. Once we flew to the East Coast to do a ten day tour, so I made ten days’ worth of desserts and packed the freezer and fridge with mise en place. I returned to an apocalypse of melted ice cream containers, shattered pâte sucrée shells, and a sink overflowing with week-old crusty and fermented sheet pans. There were stale cookies tangled loosely in shredded plastic wrap. It was like an episode of Life After People at a crummy culinary school commissary. I was the only one horrified. Welcome back! We missed you! Not my finest moment, but Wrangler Brutes got to play a Halloween show with Lightning Bolt at a warehouse in Providence, Rhode Island, where the floor nearly collapsed, and another great show in DC, where I received the highest drum compliment of my life from my friend Lili: “Your drumming totally induced my period!”
The owner of Les Deux Cafes was a sheepish Woody Allen type and he appointed his daughter, a creepy LA rich-kid, phony-artist type, as the manager. She lived in a room behind the pastry kitchen and woke up at 11 a.m. every day, walked into our shared bathroom in her boxers, and took a vicious narcotics-induced dump while I taught myself Pierre Hermé macaron recipes in the adjacent kitchen. When one of the head chefs quit, she was crowned executive chef. She created a menu that was mostly vegan, but it had a bunch of random veal dishes on it. One day, stoned out of her skull, she asked me to use more “granola” in the desserts. To this day, I can’t look at granola without getting a cold, clammy feeling in my soul.
In late December of that year, I asked if there were any plans for a New Year’s Eve menu. Everyone shrugged their shoulders and said, “Uh, maybe. We dunno. Maybe we’ll just be closed.” It seemed weird that a nightclub would close on New Year’s Eve, but I was kind of relieved and set out on a series of Wrangler Brutes shows from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Portland to Seattle instead. I came back to find the locks of Les Deux Cafes changed and a note on the door saying the place was no longer in operation. My cookbooks and tools were locked inside and management was already delinquent on my last two paychecks. I scaled the wall, retrieved my cookbooks and crappy knives from the unlocked kitchen, hurled them into the parking lot, and hoisted myself back over the wall.
I applied again at Campanile the next day, desperate to put this dark era behind me. Luckily, the restaurant just happened to need a pastry sous-chef, so I took the job and learned more than I ever had. The nightclub wasn’t on my résumé, so mid prep a few months in, as we were making one of Nancy Silverton’s classic sorbet bases, Dahlia, the pastry chef, asked me, “So what the fuck were you doing for that first year you lived here?” I told her, looking down shamefully into my bowl of strawberry puree. Dahlia erupted in fitful laughter and couldn’t stop. It was the cherry on the fuck-you sundae.
Everyone likes sorbet. It sidesteps nearly all dietary restrictions: no eggs, no dairy, no gluten. But a good sorbet is hard to find. It needs to be extremely creamy—as creamy as gelato. You should have to ask, Is this gelato? There can be no iciness, no crumbliness. Never.
A spoonful of sorbet should feel like you are biting into the fruit’s most perfect form: raspberries from the field next to your grandmother’s house in the country, peaches straight off the branch in Sicily. The acidity and sweetness must be laser-focused, but in the most natural and organic way possible.
For these reasons and others, sorbet has no ironclad recipe at Del Posto. Fresh, beautiful, fragile fruit picked at its peak is always subtly different. A recipe of exact measurements in grams would be both irresponsible and wrong. All my cooks make sorbets with their palate, tasting constantly at every stage of the process. Find really good fruit. Quality can’t be fudged in any kitchen, professional or otherwise.
Commit this to memory and save yourself the worry. It’s easy and you’ll need it often.
Yield: 2 cups
Water 2 cups (473 grams)
Sugar 2¼ cups (450 grams)
Dextrose ⅓ cup (120 grams)
In a small saucepot over high heat, bring the water to a full, rolling boil and whisk in the sugar and dextrose. Bring the mixture back to a boil and remove from the heat. Let cool. You can store this mixture in an airtight container in your fridge indefinitely. Please: Make sure the sorbet syrup is very cold when you use it to make your sorbets.
You can use pretty much any dense fruit that purees well: strawberries, peaches, plums, and the like. Don’t use lemons or limes. Don’t use any citrus for that matter. Note: You will need about 4 cups fruit for 2 cups puree.
Yield: 1½ quarts
Fruit puree 2 cups (weight varies by fruit)
Sorbet Syrup (above), chilled 2 cups (500 grams)
Lemon juice to taste
Malic acid to taste
Salt to taste
1. Make a decision: Do you want really smooth sorbet? If you do, run the puree through a chinois or fine-mesh strainer. (If you don’t, don’t.)
2. In a medium bowl, combine the puree, sorbet syrup, lemon juice, malic acid, and salt and stir. In an airtight container, refrigerate the sorbet until cold, about 3 hours.
3. Spin in an ice cream machine according to the manufacturer’s instructions. In a prechilled container, freeze the sorbet for at least 2 hours before serving. This will store well for 1 month.
To serve: There are few limitations on when or how you can serve this.
For the celery juice in this recipe, you can do one of three things: buy the juice; use a juicer (pretty easy!); or chop up a bunch of celery, completely eviscerate it with an immersion blender, and pass it through a chinois (discard the pulp).
Yield: 1½ cups
Celery juice 2¼ cups (550 grams)
Sorbet Syrup (above), chilled 2 cups (500 grams)
Salt to taste
Malic acid to taste
1. In a medium bowl, combine the celery juice and sorbet syrup. Season with salt and malic acid. It will take a fair amount of salt. In an airtight container, refrigerate the sorbet until cold, at least 3 hours.
2. Spin in an ice cream machine according to the manufacturer’s instructions. In a prechilled container, freeze the sorbet for at least 2 hours before serving. This will store well for 1 month.
To serve: This accompanies Sfera di Caprino (here).
Yield: About 2 cups
Rhubarb, unpeeled and chopped 2 cups (274 grams)
Sugar 1 cup (200 grams)
Juice from 1 lemon
Water ½ cup (118 grams)
Dextrose ½ cup (200 grams)
Salt to taste
1. In a medium saucepan over high heat, combine the rhubarb, sugar, lemon juice, water, and dextrose and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and cook until the rhubarb breaks down completely, about 10 minutes. Remove from the heat, let it cool, puree, and strain through a chinois or fine-mesh strainer. In an airtight container, refrigerate until cold, at least 3 hours.
2. Spin in an ice cream machine according to the manufacturer’s instructions. In a prechilled container, freeze the sorbet for at least 2 hours before serving. This will hold in the freezer for 1 week in an airtight container.
To serve: Present as part of Lemon-Ginger Curd with Rhubarb and Polenta Chips (here).
Yield: About 3 cups
Labneh 2 cups (500 grams)
Simple syrup (see here) 1¼ cups (418 grams)
Salt to taste
1. In a medium deep-sided bowl, using an immersion blender, combine the labneh, simple syrup, and salt.
2. Spin in an ice cream machine according to the manufacturer’s instructions. In a prechilled container, freeze the sorbet for at least 2 hours. This will store well for about 1 month.
To serve: Present as part of Cucumber Creamsicle (here).
SOUR APRICOT SORBET (THE DRIED FRUIT METHOD)
Yield: About 2 cups
Dried apricots 2 cups (226 grams)
Verjus one 750-milliliter bottle
Sugar 1 cup (200 grams)
Sorbet Syrup (here), chilled approximately 2 cups
Salt to taste
Lemon juice to taste
1. In a large bowl, combine the apricots and verjus and let soak for at least 48 hours. Drain the verjus, puree the apricots in a blender with a little water, and pass the puree through a chinois or fine-mesh strainer.
2. In a large bowl, measure in the apricot puree. Add in one-half that amount of sorbet syrup (for example, for 2 cups of apricot puree you add, 1 cup of sorbet syrup). Add salt and lemon juice to taste.
3. Spin in an ice cream machine according to the manufacturer’s instructions. In a prechilled container, freeze for at least 2 hours before serving. This will store well for 1 month.
To serve: Present as part of Sour Apricot Sorbet and Cashew Gelato Coppettina (here).
THE AGGRAVATING ORIGIN OF THE BEAUTIFUL SOUR APRICOT SORBET AND CASHEW GELATO COPPETTINA
Sometimes having garbage thrown in your face really gets the creative juices flowing.
My dry goods purveyor, a big company with lots of big trucks that clog up the streets of Manhattan, has a rep who likes to send me the wrong stuff all the time. His name is German (pronounced Herrr-maaan).
A few years ago, in the middle of a screaming phone call with German, I said, “Herrr-maaan, your phone number is the only one I have memorized in the world. I don’t even know my girlfriend’s number! If I ever get arrested, you’re the only guy I can call!” German seemed touched.
German once sent me fifty pounds of cashews I didn’t order. Cashews are not even vaguely Italian. I called to have them returned, but nobody ever came to get them. They sat in the box in the storage room and collected dust. My e-mails were not returned either. My follow-up calls went unanswered. So to spite German, I started making cashew gelato. And goddamnit, German: It’s delicious.
We toasted the nuts until nearly carbonized and then used them to infuse the milk. Unlike with other nuts, the buttery, burned richness of the cashews really came through nicely into a gelato base. It was a victory. We made the gelato really salty and it was exciting. And there was some textural bite added by tossing salted, toasted cashews with olive oil and folding them into the finished gelato. It was like the snap of that fantastic autumn special Quarterback Crunch ice cream from Baskin-Robbins that got me so psyched as a little kid.
The sour apricot component of this dish is a sorbet made with dried fruit that’s been soaked in verjus. This is a hobby of mine (see here), done in small doses. But then one day the meat line unloaded fourteen quarts of unrequested dried apricots soaked in verjus on me: Hey, pastry boy, use this shit up. We changed the menu. This is left over from the last duck prep. Make some fucking ice cream or whatever. How should we know? Sorbet, it turned out, works like a charm with verjus-plumped apricots, which are tart and juicy, and in some ways better than fresh apricots, which are in their prime in New York for only a few weeks every year. Another victory.
Because both of these frozen confections were born as refuse, as castoffs, I figured pairing them up might make sense. And, Jesus, did it. I serve these together as Sour Apricot Sorbet and Cashew Gelato Coppettina as a pre-dessert at Del Posto, and I have for many years now. In all this time I haven’t been able to come up with a combo quite as wonderful. We serve it in an impossibly tiny cup. Two quick bites and you are done. I describe it as our fake Italian Creamsicle made out of a bunch of stuff I didn’t want.
Here’s how you do it: Make a batch each of Sour Apricot Sorbet (here) and Cashew Gelato (here). Put a spoon of each in a small bowl and dress them with freshly Microplane-d orange zest and a splat of extra-virgin olive oil.
LIDIA’S SWEET PEA CAKE WITH MACERATED STRAWBERRIES, STRAWBERRY GELATO, AND CANDIED SPLIT PEAS
“You have to be really good at hiding who you are stealing from.”
—Buzz Osborne, Melvins, 2008
Buzz speaks the truth, and for the most part I live by this mantra. But there are times that I want to be perfectly clear about what I’m stealing and from whom.
I knew about this dish. I’d read all about it. Originally on the menu at Lidia Bastianich’s restaurant Felidia, the sweet pea cake was fabricated by Lara Brumgnach, Felidia’s former pastry chef. She taught me how to make it. We call it “Lidia’s” because it is a variation on Lidia’s white bean cake from her first cookbook. Somehow the pea version is slightly less weird.
I started making a pea version at Del Posto the second summer I was there, in 2009. I would have put it on the menu immediately, but I was too busy cleaning house of whiny, pouty cooks to get my creative groove working. Whenever Lara comes around and notices it on the menu, she rolls her eyes at me and shakes her head, like a disappointed dad. I suppose I changed her version around a little bit, but not all that much: She invented it, and I just make it.
The key here is to use the best strawberries you can get your hands on. In New York City, we restaurant folk and early-rising home cooks are blessed to live adjacent to the Hudson Valley, where Tristar strawberries flourish in the mid to late summer. In other parts of the country, strawberry season is fleeting (except in California, but that doesn’t count—California is a sovereign state in terms of fruits and vegetables), but Tristars are resilient; they just keep on producing fruit until October, when I finally stop buying them because, well, it’s October! They kick the ass of just about any other strawberry I have run across. Those creepy little fraises des bois the Frenchies love? No, thanks: seedy, flavorless, expensive. Plus their carbon footprint is insane. But Tristars? My god, I have a big, big crush on them. They are so one-of-a-kind crazy and scream New York City summer (even though, yes, they overstay their welcome into fall), and yet we can still hang out and watch Jackass 3D together because they are so down to earth. They are tiny and red all the way through. They have a scandalous backstory that involves being stolen from the side of a mountain in Utah and then smuggled back to upstate New York, where they took over like the “meteor shit” in the first Creepshow movie. They burst forth with crazy strawberry flavor. And they are a local product of New York. Talk about warming the cockles of my punk rock heart. And they’re called Tristars. That could easily be the name of a Kraftwerk song, and there’s probably no higher compliment.
But let’s talk about the peas, because I know what’s happening: You live in Brockport, New York, or Washington, Pennsylvania, or Salina, Kansas, and the strawberry tirade is pissing you off because there’s not much chance of your finding Tristars. The peas are frozen, OK? Always and forever. You can find the peas anywhere.
Fresh peas are a pain in the ass anyway, and unless you are serving them barely cooked in the style of Dan Barber at Blue Hill, not a soul on earth is going to be able to tell if you’re serving frozen peas. Fergus Henderson of St. John in London has one of my favorite quotes of all time: “Wait until fresh peas are in season, and then use frozen.” Genius. So look at it like this. Get some beautiful local strawberries when they are in season and have some frozen peas waiting in the freezer. It’ll work. In any case, the strawberry gelato tastes so much like summer and childhood and innocence, even the grumpiest grouch bitching about peas being on a dessert in the first place will be won over.
Yield: 6 small cakes
CANDIED SPLIT PEAS
Frozen peas ¼ cup (36 grams)
Turbinado sugar
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
1. Thaw the frozen peas. Using a paring knife, make a slit in the pea skin and gently press out the interior peas. Discard the wrinkly exteriors.
2. In a small bowl, combine the split peas, sugar, olive oil, and salt and toss until the peas are thoroughly coated.
SWEET PEA CAKE
Whole milk ¼ cup (60 grams)
Sugar ⅓ teaspoon plus ¾ cup (5 grams plus 150 grams)
Active dry yeast 1¼ teaspoons (5 grams)
Eggs 3, separated
Peas 12 ounces (217 grams), pureed
Bread Crumbs ½ cup (here), for the pan
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2. In a medium microwavable bowl, zap the milk in the microwave for 30 seconds. (It should be warm; if it’s too hot, it will kill the yeast you are about to add.) Add ⅓ teaspoon of the sugar and the yeast and stir once to dissolve. Let the mixture sit for 10 minutes.
3. In the bowl of a stand mixer, using a whip attachment, combine the egg yolks and ¼ cup of the sugar on medium speed until pale yellow, about 3 minutes.
4. In a medium bowl, mix together the yeast mixture with the pea puree. Fold in the yolk mixture and set aside. Clean the bowl and whip attachment of the stand mixer.
5. In the clean bowl of the stand mixer, using the whip attachment, beat the egg whites on high until they aren’t getting any taller and have reached stiff peaks. Turn the speed down to medium and slowly add the remaining ½ cup sugar. With a rubber spatula, gently fold the egg whites into the pea mixture.
6. Spray a 6-cup cupcake tin with nonstick cooking spray, sprinkle the bottom of each cup with plain bread crumbs, and fill each halfway with batter. Bake for exactly 16 minutes. The cakes will double in size, and then fall when removed from the oven. It’s OK; this is how it’s supposed to be.
7. Allow the cakes to cool in the tin and separate them from the sides with a butter knife. Gently remove when ready to use.
FOR SERVING
Strawberry Sauce (here)
Strawberry Gelato (here)
Macerated strawberries
To serve: Smear some strawberry sauce on a plate. Tear the pea cake into 3 pieces and top with macerated strawberries, a scoop of strawberry gelato, and a few of the candied split peas.
