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.
The photos below are reprinted with the permission of the imaginative bakers and chefs who took them.
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.
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)
Librae Bakery sticky bun FTW.
I’m adding Lapita Sherbert to my list of places to visit in Japan!