The year of regenerative baking
Dessert is the only resolution worth making
When I was asked last week about my New Year’s resolutions, I demurred, because pledges to jog more, read a book a week, or learn a language just don’t roll off my tongue the way they used to. Life is too busy (!), the world is too gray (!) to add anything to my plate that isn’t a silly little treat.
But what if silly little treats could warm our frigid souls and build a more regenerative food system? That, baking buds, is the double-decker promise of this newsletter. Every slice of confetti cake, every any-fruit muffin snarfed over breakfast is a step toward a brighter food future. So let’s pass on the whole literacy thing. Let’s make 2024 the year of dessert.
Four ways to bake regeneratively in 2024
Bake with more plants. Plant-based ingredients cut carbon, and some swaps are as easy as — nay, easier than — pie. Thinning a sugar cookie glaze with plant milk uses a third the carbon of dairy milk. Aquafaba, the liquid from a can of chickpeas, makes a decadently dark chocolate mousse. And this plant-based pumpkin cheesecake requires little more than a whisk, while helping maintain the delusion that the holidays aren’t over.
Turn leftover ingredients into dessert. Grandma was waste-busting in the kitchen long before we understood it as a climate opportunity, using heat and sugars to extend shelf life. Trifle, after all, is a retro-core resurrection of stale cake. Granita is divine ascension for fading fruit. The waste-not recipes I love most are flexible enough to star whatever’s lurking in the back of your fridge, like Irene and Mei Li’s what-you’ve-got citrus cake.
Bake with biodiverse ingredients. Biodiversity in the fields makes for more resilient farmer livelihoods and food systems, as well as more intriguing desserts. Beth Dooley found that Kernza flour makes the butterscotchiest toffee bars. I found I could eat 12 of them. Brian Noyes found pawpaws make a uniquely Appalachian chess pie.
Bake with native ingredients. Baking with ingredients native to the Americas can remind us we’re participants in an ecosystem. How’s Freddie Bitsoie’s chocolate and piñon nutcake for a delicious reminder? Indigenous desserts can also help us get out of the eggs-and-dairy echo chamber that is modern, Eurocentric baking. Mariah Gladstone’s sunflower maple cookies tell us there’s another way, and sometimes it takes just three ingredients. Two, if you don’t count salt.
Welcome aboard, buds!
If I had a shell horn, I’d bellow a hearty welcome to all the new baking buds who joined in over the holidays. We’re glad to have you here. I spent part of my year-end break getting January’s stories ready, so we have treats in store: an upcoming regenerative ingredient guide, new recipes — including one from my botanical baking crush
— and a round-up of the internet’s best rare-fruit desserts, inspired by The Ark of Taste. Stay tuned. And save room for dessert.
Yes to the year of dessert! And happy new year!