Pure Dessert: True Flavors, Inspiring Ingredients, and Simple Recipes

When you are working with great ingredients, you want to keep it simple. You don't want to blur flavor by overcomplicating. This is why Pure Dessert, from the beloved Alice Medrich, offers the simplest of recipes, using the fewest ingredients in the most interesting ways. There are no glazes, fillings, or frostings — just dessert at its purest, most elemental, and most flavorful.

Alice deftly takes us places we haven't been, using, for example, whole grains, usually reserved for breads, to bring a lovely nutty quality to cookies and strawberry shortcake. Pound cake takes on a new identity with a touch of olive oil and sherry. Unexpected cheeses make divine souffles. Chestnut flour and walnuts virtually transform meringue. Varietal honeys and raw sugars infuse ice creams and sherbets with delectable new flavor.

Inspired choices of ingredients are at the heart of this collection of entirely new recipes: sesame brittle ice cream, corn-flour tuiles with tangy sea salt and a warming bite of black pepper, honey caramels, strawberries with single-malt sabayon.

To witness Alice's idea-stream as she describes how she arrived at each combination is to instantly understand why three of her books have won Best Cookbook of the Year. She's an experimenter, tinkerer, and sleuth, fascinated with trial and error, with the effects of small changes in recipes, exploring combinations tirelessly and making remarkable discoveries. Does cold cream or hot cream do a better job coaxing out the flavor of mint leaves or rose petals? Why is it that dusting a warm brownie with spices gives it an enticing aromatic nose, whereas putting the spice in the batter blurs the chocolate flavor? Do cooked strawberries or raw make for the better sorbet?

Loaded with advice and novel suggestions, with great recipes and eye-catching, full-color photographs that show off these simple, straightforward desserts, Pure Dessert is an education and a revelation. Thank you, Alice!

Always an experimenter, tinkerer, and thinker, the renowned baker and three-time Cookbook of the Year winner Alice Medrich expands the dessert-making vocabulary in Pure Dessert. Using an exciting array of delicate handmade cheeses, wholesome grains, and other ingredients (often ethnic) that are now widely available, she broadens our flavor palate even as she simplifies and demystifies baking techniques.

Grains such as buckwheat bring a lovely nutty quality to cookies and strawberry shortcake. Pound cake takes on a whole new identity with a touch of olive oil and sherry. Chestnut flour and walnuts virtually transform meringue. Varietal honeys and raw sugars infuse ice creams and sherbets with delectable new flavor.

The desserts that Medrich has devised are not only better-tasting and unusual, but—because they’re not heavily sauced or sugared—they’re more healthful as well. With eye-catching, full-color photographs that show how easy it is to make these 150 simple, straightforward recipes, Pure Dessert is a revelation.

IN PURSUIT OF PLEASURE viii

Before You Start 1

A LIGHT SWITCHED ON: PURSUING FLAVOR 32

The Flavors of Milk 34

WHY BOTHER? 45

The Flavors of Grain, Nuts, and Seeds 56

EXPERIMENTING WITH UNKNOWNS: COOKIES 2.0 84

The Flavors of Fruit 98

The Flavors of Chocolate 134

PURE AND SIMPLE CHOCOLATE 156

The Flavors of Honey and Sugar 170

TASTING SUGAR 194

The Flavors of Herbs and Spices, Flowers and Leaves 198

TIPS ON ICE CREAM MAKING 224

The Flavors of Wine, Beer, and Spirits 230

RESOURCES 249

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 253

INDEX 255