Some of my favorite editions of Pale Blue Tart last year were the monthly-ish menus compiling glamor shots of climate-friendly bakes I spotted on Instagram. There was the gazillion-grain cake menu that served biodiversity by the slice, the spooky menu that starred @vulvalasvegan’s unsettling sandworm cake, and the santa-ready regenerative cookie plate. Each menu was a bite-sized declaration: Pastry chefs and bakers are already baking regeneratively, turning plant-forward, low-waste, and biodiverse ingredients into treats I want to snarf.
This year I’ll be releasing these menus more often, and I’m going to call them the Bakery Box. And because this column has a curatorial energy to it (shoves glasses up nose), I’m adding a section at the end called An Extra Helping, highlighting my favorite recent reads and listens about dessert in the era of climate change.
The first Bakery Box of the year is quite the collector’s edition. Peer in to find five pastries that star fruits and grains that are included in Slow Food’s rare-foods directory The Ark of Taste. Each ingredient made Slow Food’s list because of its unique flavor and history; each made my list if it’s also uniquely vulnerable or adapted to climate change and stars in a killer dessert. Read on to see why climate action might save a lesser-known cousin of the Ocracoke fig cake, and why an Arkansas black apple tart is climate action incarnate.
The pastry glamor shots below are reprinted with permission from the bakers and pastry chefs who made them.
Hog Island fig ribbon cake
As sea levels creep up along Virginia’s barrier islands, they’re threatening to wash away the Hog Island fig, a saltwater-adapted and floral-flavored variety that has starred in a local fig ribbon cake since the late 1800s. The recipe is kind of like its cake cousin to the south, the Ocracoke fig cake, pictured here in a buttermilk-soaked rendition by pastry chef Erika Chan that is probably single-handedly capable of convincing lagging politicians to take climate action.
Arkansas black apple tart
Every slice of Kevin Yang’s apple and hazelnut praline tart is a vote for the little apple that could: the Arkansas black. Deep purple in hue, this bitty apple variety does something most apples can’t — it pollinates itself (honestly, good for it!), which is a reliable insurance policy against increasing environmental mayhem. It also tolerates heat and humidity with grace (unrelatable), and adds a pear-like sweet-tartness to pies and tarts alike.
Arkansas black apple spice muffins
The Arkansas black apple can also keep well for months. Iris Green, who owns The Littlest Bake Shop in Kansas City, lets the ones she picks at Sunflower Farm in Paola, KS age for a while “so the depth of flavor can develop.” Then she plops them directly atop her apple spice muffins.
White Sonoran wheat croissant
An oft-forgotten climate action strategy? Croissants. Croissants are a canvas for diverse varieties of wheat, like the arid-adapted white Sonoran wheat that pastry chef Crystal Kass layers into her croissants at Valentine in Phoenix. Preserving regionally adapted wheats gives crop breeders more to work with as they race to help the staple crop adapt to climate change. It also gives pastry groupies a little extra-nutty flavor.
Salmonberry shortcake
Every time you eat one of Susannah Ruth Bryan’s salmonberry shortcakes at her British Columbia bakery, a wetland is restored (probably). Salmonberries are native to the Pacific northwest, where they grow in big brambles along stream banks and reduce flooding — a useful skill in an area plagued by increasingly frequent atmospheric rivers. As Greta Thunberg and Marie Antoinette both said: Let them eat shortcake.
An extra helping
Explore: There are lots more rare foods that Slow Food is working to catalog and protect through The Ark of Taste — check ‘em out
Read: Kim Severson predicts that water consciousness and buckwheat — which I wrote about last summer — will be among 2024’s top food trends
Read: Speaking of water: In the strawberry fields of California, imposing a water tax actually worked, as Coral Davenport reports for the NYT
Read:
, the cake genius behind Bayou Saint Cake, foresees more dessert towers this year (what won’t be a croquembouche?), but hopes we’re done with styrofoam basesListen: Dressler Parsons, host of the Regenerative Baking podcast, interviews Brian Levy about naturally sweet desserts
Yay for bakery boxes!