The bakery box: Volcanic sherbert edition

Climate-friendly bakes peeped on Instagram this month

A ruby-hued, soy-milk sherbert made at the base of an active volcano. A choux speckled with oat craquelin. A sticky bun that gives croissant bits a new lease on life.

These are among the treats in this month’s bakery box, an imagined compendium of climate-era desserts assembled, Pinterest-board style, from stuff I’ve seen chefs and bakers posting on Instagram lately. 

Dessert’s more climate-friendly future can seem far off until you realize that, bite by bite, it’s emerging all around us. There are treats recasting creams and caramels with nary a smidge of carbon-intensive animal products. There are pastries deftly incorporating leftovers to add flavor and spare scraps from a methane-y fate in the landfill. And there are cakes — oh, the cakes! — cheering for a more biodiverse food system just by using a wider variety of grains. 

Read on to gawk at the five climate-friendly treats I wanted to pile in a bakery box and snarf this month, and for an extra helping of desserty links.

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The photos below are reprinted with the permission of the imaginative bakers and chefs who took them.

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Lapita’s sweet-and-sour — and plant-based! — sherbert

Sherbert usually gets its lip-smacking creaminess from a logical source: dairy. But take the ferry to Sakurajima — one of Japan’s spiciest volcanoes — and you’ll find a dairy-less version made at its base. Lapita Sherbert churns out soy milk-based scoops in seasonal flavors like green tea-lemongrass, apple-daikon, and sweet-and-sour plum. 

The croissant-reincarnating Librae sticky bun

The sticky bun at Librae Bakery in New York isn’t just a layered, frosting-smeared godsend of a midmorning snack — it’s also one of head pastry chef Lauren Madson’s no-waste projects. “It uses croissants as a leavener and base,” she writes on Instagram, “saving food from the trash and creating a beautifully fermented flavor.”

Loba’s butterless tarte tatin

You typically find butter — lots of it — in both the puff pastry and the caramel of a tarte tatin, but Paris-based Loba Pâtisserie’s version is entirely plant-based. Come for the most elegant and un-rustic tatin you’ve ever seen in your life (props to chefs Cris Massana and Martina Sampaolo), and stay for the jaunty shortcrust leaf-hat.

Elisa Sunga’s spelt poppy seed chiffon cake

Elisa Sunga, the color-inspired baker behind @saltedrye, is in her yellow era. She doses one of her sunniest cakes — her lemon poppy seed chiffon — with spelt flour, adding a dash of resilience to each bite in the process. Agrobiodiversity is nature’s insurance plan against change of all kinds (climate or otherwise); and whole grain-spiked chiffon cake may be its tastiest ambassador.

Christine’s choux with an oat craquelin

So is @chouxandsunshine’s banana salted caramel sesame choux with an oat craquelin. Craquelin, that speckled surface that looks like drying lava, begins as a smooth disc of butter, flour, and sugar draped delicately over a piped choux puff before baking. Typically made with wheat flour, Christine’s craquelin incorporates oat flour, whose mild flavor lets the banana, caramelized white chocolate, and roasted Japanese sesame paste shine.

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An extra helping

Gawk: at Lapita Sherbert’s other flavors. Local author and painter Miroco Machiko recommended the mango pepper and roasted green tea soy chai to The New York Times Style Magazine.

Bake: this one-bowl chocolate cake from last week that makes a solid Valentine’s Day emergency plan. As do its leftovers, which are happy to become trifle.

Read: this story on the wacky flours that cut waste from the industrial food system. Grapeseed-flour muffins, anyone? (via Gastro Obscura)

Read: my explainer for one5c on ‘regenerative’ claims on food packaging. To some people, the term connotes more-than-sustainable. In the grocery store, it’s mostly about soil health — but it’s squishy. (via one5c)