Could dessert get—dare I say it—healthier?
My story for The Guardian chasing climate cuisine desserts
Here’s something I never saw coming: Earlier this year, I ate the best sticky toffee pudding of my life, and it contained nary a smidge of granulated sugar. No brown sugar or honey, either. Instead, it was entirely sweetened with fruit and a bit of milk powder and miso, which did a bang-up job of mimicking the complex umami-sweetness of caramel.
This was a surprise because, well, I’ve always understood sugar and dessert to be as inextricably intertwined as the strands of a DNA helix. Sugar was a core ingredient in the cheesecakes and plum cakes and frostings my dessert-pro mom taught me how to make as a kid, and in every recipe I later learned at the Le Cordon Bleu Paris pastry program.
So whenever questions about dessert and health arose—like how the overconsumption of added sugars is driving dietary diseases and perhaps even contributing to some cancers—I always thought the only answer was “moderation” (boo) unless you want “raw truffles” (double boo).
But as I write in my first story for The Guardian (!), dessert—really good dessert—could become somewhat healthier than we think, with a little help from fruit and other whole-food sweeteners.
The tension between dessert and health has always made a part of me uncomfy, particularly as I’ve started thinking hard about the idea of climate cuisine over the past few years. To me, sustainable eating should clearly mean lower-carbon ingredients and dishes, but at its best, I think it could also support biodiversity, food sovereignty, and, yes, human health.
Thinking dessert could never swing the health element, or even get anywhere close, I basically just avoided the topic here and elsewhere, until my life changed six months ago. In the fall, my mom was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer. All of a sudden, in our family, nutrition was paramount—a vital complementary tool in the treatment toolbox. Sugar wasn’t something we could throw around willy-nilly anymore.
In the calmer moments between my mom’s appointments and procedures and treatments, she and I would stare at each other over our altar—my parents’ kitchen counter in Pittsburgh—and wonder: How do we do dessert now? How do we speak in our decades-old shared language of plum cakes and chocolate frango and crazy cake when sugar is no longer a trusted friend, but a harm, a risk?
My mom is the best baker I know (besides one of her sisters, who hosts an annual dessert-themed reunion), and she abides no lackluster dessert. My mom and I once ate six key lime pies in as many days, just to figure out which one had the infinitesimal edge over the others. So to figure out what desserts would work for this moment in our lives and also totally rule, I turned first to accomplished pastry chef
’s fruit-sweetened cookbook Good & Sweet, and then to broader questions, like:How far could whole-food sweetening go? In which desserts is sugar absolutely necessary, no bones about it? And how healthy could dessert get without losing the magic that draws us to it in the first place?
What resulted from these questions and my conversations with pastry chefs, as you’ll read in the Guardian story, is almost like the start of a dessert-sugar scatterplot. There are some desserts that need all their added sugar to shine. (Leave them alone! No touchie!) There are some that need a bit of sugar, but can be their best selves with a good deal less than we typically think. And there are some that are just as tasty—or tastier—when sweetened with a broader, whole-food palette of sweeteners rather than refined sugar.
This story was a quest for my mom and me, seeking healthier dessert with the skepticism of cake fanatics. And along the way, it helped me start to understand a piece that had been missing from my sustainable dessert puzzle. I still feel I’ve only scratched the surface, but I now know this: Healthier dessert isn’t necessarily an oxymoron. Done right, it can be a treat on the menu that needs no qualifier.
Bake these fruit-sweetened treats
Coffee bean panna cotta (Brian’s recipe via The Guardian—he and I picked this recipe of his to run because it’s super doable!)
“Elegante pandekager” Danish pancakes (via Brian’s newsletter
)Peaches ‘n dates pop-tarts (Joan Smith’s recipe via Rancho Meladuco)
Drunk quinces (also a recipe of Brian’s, via Colu Cooks)
News
Remember how I shifted this newsletter from weekly to ~fortnightly~ so I’d have time to spend on freelance writing? To quote our lord and savior Michael Scott, it’s happening!
For one5c, I explained why reducing food miles isn’t the low-carbon eating win it seems to be, and what to do instead
For Points In Case, comedy writer Madeline Goetz and I wrote an FAQ about ExxonMobil’s Plant-a-Tree Pledge that should really clear things up
Familius Books had me on their podcast for Earth Day to chat sustainable cooking and baking
And if you missed it earlier this month, you can catch my talk with Green Builder Media about climate-friendly baking here
A great issue to read! Congrats on all the W
This was so beautiful to read. Thank you for sharing and I can't wait to make some of these desserts!