The bakery box: Climate cones
Imagining climate cuisine through ice cream. No, really!
This is the latest semi-regular installment of The Bakery Box, a column spotlighting desserts from pastry chefs and bakers who are bringing climate cuisine to life.
A canelé-flavored ice cream that turns stale canelé scraps into a pastry-scented custard. A plant-based apricot sorbet with such fluffy peaks you’d think it used a whipped egg white. A scoop made with moringa, the drought-proof supertree whose leaves give desserts an earthy, matcha-like flavor. These are some of the frosty treats I peeped on Instagram this month and mentally assembled into a climate-friendly scoop shop.
Every summer, as I begin my annual season of soft-serve worship and door-to-door waffle-cone evangelism, I wonder: What would the future of food look like if you projected it onto an ice cream cone? If lower-carbon, plant-based ingredients made sundaes that can keep up with dairy? If vanilla ice cream were a tool to fight food waste—an edible mad-lib for fridge odds-and-ends? If climate-adapted flavors were as common on menus as strawberry and double-fudge chunk?
There’s tons of plant-based ice cream in the grocery store these days, to be sure, but I find it’s the pastry chefs and individual makers who are bringing the most thought-provoking and boundary-pushing climate cones to life. Scroll to visually slurp eight of their sustainable scoops.
The photos below are reprinted with the permission of the imaginative chefs and foodies who took them.
Birdseed ice cream set
This birdseed ice cream set isn’t just the quintessential dessert for 30-something millennials crossing the inevitable birdwatching rubicon—it’s also plant-based, and lower-carbon for it. Instead of using dairy in their ice cream base, chefs Kate Lasky and Tomasz Skowronski at Pittsburgh’s Apteka use sunflower-seed milk. The softball-sized scoops surround a gooey caramel core, are rolled in salty-sweet granola with all the seedy fixins, and are plopped atop a puddle of pumpkin-seed chocolate for good measure.
Apricot sorbet with coconut water and jasmine
Pastry chef
’s sorbet is the jasmine-scented apricot wave I want to ride all summer while remaining blissfully stationary on the shore. It’s so fluffy I wouldn’t have been surprised if it got some of its loft from an egg white or two, but the Copenhagen-based pastry chef’s sorbet is entirely plant-based—as are all her sorbets.
Maple miso ice cream
Chef Rob Rubba’s maple-miso ice cream at Oyster Oyster in DC is both plant-based and the platonic ideal of a quenelle—the fancy term for that svelte little oval that’s made with a deft turn of a spoon. The scoop sits atop a base of green corn masa and baked apples.
Canelé conelé(!)
The canelé conelé is, firstly, a name that @fremecraiche needs to patent stat, and secondly, an airtight argument that ice cream is a food waste solution. Paige had leftover canelés that were going stale, so she cut ‘em up to dry overnight, steeped ‘em in cream and milk for a day, then used that canelé-infused cream in her ice cream’s custard base. “It seemed like the natural thing to do with leftover pastries,” she told me by email while I drooled directly onto my keyboard. “A plain ice cream base is limitless because fat takes on so much flavor.”
Crispy sourdough crunch ice cream
This caramelized sourdough scoop is for those of us who lack an ice cream maker but possess stale bread galore and a pint of vanilla that’s willing and ready to be a canvas for leftovers. Cookbook author Ruth Tam caramelized bitty-bits of stale bread in brown butter and sugar and swirled them through ice cream—the perfect move for when you’ve already made four batches of cheesy-crisp croutons.
Ice cream streaked with use-it-up jam
Recipe developer Joy Huang’s rhubarb quick-jam ice cream is a reminder that any forgotten fruit languishing in your crisper drawer would be delighted to be cooked down with some sugar and lemon and spooned into ice cream. Hark: my ice-cream-jam summer commenceth!
Moringa ice cream
Cookbook author Maria Bradford’s moringa ice cream is a climate-proof scoop if I’ve ever met one. Moringa is a drought-proof tree that may be increasingly important for food security in the tropics as they warm, and its powdered leaves infuse custards, cheesecakes, and ice creams with matcha-like magic.
Knotweed sorbet
The knotweed sorbet from the Culinary Vegetable Institute in Ohio is a reminder to eat your invasives. They’re free if you forage ‘em, you can never take too much, and they can make damn good desserts—like this tangy, rhubarb-adjacent dreamboat complete with knotweed spoon.
An extra scoop
Make one of these at home: The moringa ice cream from Maria’s cookbook Sweet Salone: Recipes from the Heart of Sierra Leone, Marie Frank’s apricot sorbet (for her paid subscribers), or a use-it-up jam to zhuzh your vanilla ice cream.
Read my story about how precision-fermented dairy ice cream is the low-carbon wave of the future for those of us who ain’t gonna ditch cows for good.
Peep British chef Tom Hunt’s new project making ice cream sammies from upcycled buttermilk. London peeps: get thee to Brockley Market!
Weep tears of joy because as of this week, Pale Blue Tart is now read by 1,000+ baking buds! Celebrate with me by leaving a comment of the ice cream flavor you snarfed most recently. I’ll start: Roasted corn!
These look incredible. Recently, I cut up and froze a cantaloupe that was a bit too ripe, and put it through my food processor. Similar effect to the "banana nice-cream". I recommend it, especially if you freeze it again, it has a shaved-ice texture.
Super interesting, thanks for sharing! (Am a huge fan of caramelised sourdough crumbs in or on top of ice cream - clearly need to make that again!)