S'mores from the food system twilight zone
A recipe with civic-action substitutions
This is the third and final installment of a little series on summertime treats for the climate era. You can read the previous editions here: A flexible recipe to give summer fruit an afterlife, and Take a scoop out of your carbon footprint.
S’mores from the food system twilight zone
The melty chocolate, the sticky fingers, and the pursuit of unincinerated toastiness: nothing says summer like a s’more. It’s a treat whose elements have deep roots, and all finally collided in a gooey, campfire-y Big Bang in the early 1900s.
Since then the s’more—with its highly processed parts—has become as good a symbol as any of our industrial food system. But I wonder, how might it evolve from here? If the US food system took a hard turn toward the sustainable and just, what might my favorite campfire treat be made of? Would it taste as stretchy-melty-delicious? And what actions could we take to bring this s’more to life faster?
S’more DNA began to take shape thousands of years ago, when early civilizations like the ancient Greeks made marshmallows from a plant called Althaea officinalis—the OG marsh mallow. Graham crackers came much later in the 1800s, when Sylvester Graham tried to curb the American sex drive with bland foods. Then Hershey produced its first milk chocolate bar in 1900, unlocking the final element and paving the way for the first “Some More” recipe, which appeared in a 1927 Girl Scout guidebook.
These days, if you push your glasses all the way up your nose and look closely, the s’more ingredient list is a sugary shorthand for our industrial food system and the political-cultural forces that keep it afloat. Highly processed foods appear in each element: white flour and soybean oil in grahams, soy lecithin (an emulsifier) in chocolate bars, and corn syrup in marshmallows. Those aren’t the only processed ingredients in s’mores, but together they cover the three stooges of American monocrop farming. Corn, soy, and wheat receive more subsidies than any other crops grown in this country. At great cost to soil health, this monocrop trifecta gets turned into livestock feed, fuel (in the case of corn), white flour, and—if all else fails—additives in packaged foods.
The emissions-intensive livestock industry also makes a more direct appearance in marshmallows. Despite the marshmallow’s plant-based roots, these days food corporations and chefs alike most often use gelatin to give the candy its quintessential stretch.
So what do you do when a dessert you love springs from a food system you wish would fall off the end of a stick right into the fire? If you’re me, you give yourself a prompt: Update the s’more so that each element channels a potential food system shift.
Dreaming and scheming a new s’more
For graham crackers, I thought of a world where crop subsidies and other investments are rejiggered, flowing not toward wheat, corn, and soy, but toward climate-adapted and soil-restoring perennial crops that feed people. A Kernza graham cracker came to mind, naturally cinnamony-sweet thanks to the distinctive flavor of the soil-restoring perennial grain. (I wrote about Kernza here; a guide to baking with it is coming this summer.)
For marshmallows, I imagined a world where desserts that can be made with plant-based ingredients are. So out with gelatin, and back to the marshmallow’s plant-based roots, though this time with agar agar, since that’s the plant-based gelling agent I know best. (Vegan marshmallows do exist, but they tend to contain lots of additives.)
For chocolate I got a little wacky. You could just source fair trade chocolate bars. But I envisioned a world where edible fruit trees line city streets and parks, creating access to fresh produce in food deserts and reacquainting urban foragers with forgotten flavors like linden “chocolate.” I channeled forager Alexis Nikole and chef Alan Bergo, dreaming up a “chocolate” sauce made of foraged linden tree fruits. It required some minor trespassing under the guise of a predawn jog in Crown Heights.
The s’more comes to life
How did this s’more from the food system twilight zone taste? The Kernza grahams were like the store-bought version turned up to 11, because Kernza’s flavor just screams graham (in a sultry way Sylvester would hate).
The marshmallows thrilled my vegan neighbors. I thought the flavor was on point, but the texture wasn’t quite as stretchy and oozy as marshmallows from a bag, since agar agar makes things firmer than gelatin does. But Blue Hill chef Andrew Luzmore’s oat marshmallow fluff gives me hope that plant-based marshmallows without additives can be perfect yet. (For the record, I tried his method too, but couldn’t recreate it.)
The “chocolate” was the biggest surprise. After you’ve acquired the linden fruits, baked and blitzed them into powder, and added sugar, they taste surprisingly—terrifyingly—like chocolate. But after you add oil to the powder to create a sauce, the taste becomes its own, very good thing. Rather than a perfect substitute for chocolate, it’s “a peanut buttery taste like roasted Kentucky coffee beans with notes of mocha,” as Alan Bergo put it.
A civic substitution guide
Developing this recipe was only half the goal. I also wanted to boil big, sometimes overwhelming food system changes down into s’more-sized bites. So if you don’t want to make homemade marshmallows or break minor city codes to harvest linden fruits, I’m offering substitutions—small steps you could take to bring this s’more and its political-cultural context to life. Because the real win will be when our favorite foods are better for people and planet by default. As I’m pretty sure somebody once said, we must be the s’more we want to see in the world.
Instead of making Kernza graham crackers:
Support The Land Institute’s work bringing perennial crops to market.
Instead of making plant-based marshmallows:
If you’re a student or alum of a culinary school, call and tell the school you want to see more plant-based programming so the next generation of chefs brings plant-based expertise into the workforce and culinary zeitgeist. (Another place to start would be offering classes outside French cuisine, since cheeseland is where Western pastry gets its reliance on animal products.)
Instead of trespassing to make foraged “chocolate:”
Tell your city council member you want your town to follow Philadelphia’s suit and plant edible street trees, combating hunger and adding shade that can combat the urban heat-island effect.
Recipe
Kernza graham crackers
This recipe is adapted from Roxana Jullapat’s recipe for oat graham crackers in Mother Grains. Kernza replaces the oat flour. The recipe and method are otherwise unchanged except that I roll them extra thin for a crisp snap that mimics store-bought. You can get Kernza flour from Perennial Pantry. If you don’t have access to Kernza, oat is delicious, too.
4 tablespoons (55g, or half a stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into half-inch cubes
2 tablespoons packed dark brown sugar
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon whole milk
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
90g (½ cup + 2 tablespoons) Kernza flour
105g (¾ cup) all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
¾ teaspoon ground cinnamon
In a medium bowl, use an electric mixer to cream together the butter and sugars. Add the honey, milk, and vanilla and mix to combine. Add the flours, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon in two additions, mixing until combined after each addition.
Place the dough between two 16-by-12-inch parchment sheets. With a rolling pin, gently roll the dough as evenly as possible—between 1/16 to ⅛ inch thick. Leaving it on the bottom sheet of parchment paper, transfer the flattened dough to a baking sheet and chill in the refrigerator for 20 minutes (or in the freezer for 5).
Place an oven rack in the top-third position and preheat the oven to 350F. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and place it, parchment-paper-side down, on a cutting board. Using a sharp knife, gently cut the dough into 2-inch squares. Using a flat, flexible spatula, gently lift up each square to separate them slightly (they won’t spread much as they bake). Collect any scraps of dough and roll out to get a few more crackers. You’ll have about two dozen.
Transfer the parchment paper and dough squares to the baking sheet. Bake for 7-9 minutes or until golden brown, rotating halfway through for even baking and watching the color so they don’t burn. Crackers will be slightly bendy right out of the oven, but will crisp up as they cool. Graham crackers or crumbs made from them will keep for up to 3 days at room temperature in an airtight container, or go soft if you’re dumb like me and forget to store them properly.
Aquafaba marshmallows
This recipe is adapted from one by PlantYou. I increased the amount of cream of tartar to give the meringue more stability, added almond extract, and swapped maple syrup for granulated sugar to channel classic marshmallow flavor.
125g (½ cup, from 1 15-oz can chickpeas) aquafaba
1 ½ teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ teaspoon almond extract
158g (⅔ c) water
1 tablespoon agar-agar powder
200g (1 cup) sugar
Powdered sugar, for dusting
Prepare an 8x8 pan by lining it with enough parchment paper to create an overhang.
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, mix the aquafaba and cream of tartar on high speed until stiff peaks form. Add the extracts and mix again until stiff peaks re-form. Set aside.
Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, whisk together the water, agar-agar powder, and sugar. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the heat to medium and cook for exactly three minutes, whisking here and there.
Using an oven mitt to hold the hot pan, carefully pour the syrup in a gentle stream into the aquafaba meringue while the mixer is running on low. Once all the syrup is incorporated, increase the mixer speed to high and mix until the meringue turns glossy and medium peaks form. Using a spatula, scoop the mixture into the prepared pan, smooth the top, and allow to harden until set, at least three hours.
To cut the marshmallows, lift up by the parchment paper sling and transfer to a cutting board. Slice into one-inch cubes. You can dust them with powdered sugar to keep them from sticking to each other too much.
Char with your preferred source of combustion: A crème brulée torch, an actual campfire, or a soaked takeout chopstick used as a spear and stuck over the lit eye of a gas range. You could also probably just take the marshmallow to Phoenix for combustion. Marshmallows keep up to 3 days in an airtight container.
Linden “chocolate” sauce
After I saw Alexis Nikole make this on TikTok, I started noticing linden trees everywhere: on the corner by the neighborhood playground, In Prospect Park—on every block in my neighborhood, actually. So I waited until it was the season, then I sprang. Green linden buds appear in late May and open into blossoms in early June, then close back up into hard little green fruits that last all summer and look like bigger versions of the buds. I found you can make this chocolate with the buds or the fruits. The taste is like mocha, roasted coffee, and a bit of peanut butter.
1-2 handfuls linden fruits (or however many you can yank off a street tree without attracting the neighbors’ notice)
Sugar, to taste
Neutral oil, to taste
Wake up at the crack of dawn and go for what appears to be an innocent jog in Crown Heights. Double back down a block once it’s empty, scurry up to a linden tree, and as fast as you can, pull off the little green fruits, heart beating fast. (“Is this allowed?” you ask yourself. If you’re in Brooklyn, the answer is that park codes technically prohibit it.) Jog back home, linden fruits hidden inside your sweaty fist. Rinse them well.
Bake them at 350F for 30-45 minutes, or until evenly browned. (All traces of green should be gone, and fruits should be baked and dried all the way through.) Allow the buds or fruits to cool to room temperature, then blitz them in a food processor. Sift out any large chunks so that you have a powder that looks surprisingly like cocoa powder. Stare at it for a while, contemplating the fact that this is how you choose to spend your free time. Add sugar until it tastes good and surprisingly chocolatey. Add enough neutral-flavored oil to make a paste or sauce, as you like. Drizzle over charred marshmallows.