Savory Sweets
Pastry chefs raid their colleagues' pantries to create, innovate.
By Derek Gale, Senior Associate Editor -- Hotels, 4/1/2008
Give chefs a little time to experiment and the results are usually tasty. And as diners continue to broaden their culinary horizons and their palates continue to evolve, experimentation in the kitchen may be healthier than ever. Nowhere is this more evident than with pastry chefs, who are increasingly borrowing from their colleagues’ savory pantries, using everything from salts and spices to herbs and vegetables to bring something new to their creations. As such, the lines between lunch or dinner and dessert are slowly blurring, with many things sweet becoming a bit more savory.
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| Frozen poppyseed mousse with vanilla-poached stone fruit is one of the slightly savory dessert recipes in Pastry Chef Gale Gand’s latest book, “Chocolate & Vanilla,” as well as an item previously available at Gale’s Coffee Bar in the Westin Chicago North Shore. Gand says she has a genetic predisposition (from her Hungarian grandparents) that attracts her to anything with poppyseeds, which are used around the world in both sweet and savory dishes. For the recipe, visit www.hotelsmag.com. |
Venturing into savory ingredients provides “a bigger platform to be more creative” and opens a new world of flavor opportunities, says Julliet Marshall, pastry chef at the Hyatt Regency Monterrey, California. That said, it is easy to get carried away, and the results can turn off guests, she notes. “I feel that a dessert should complete and complement a meal. I prefer to use spices to complement a regular dessert,” says Marshall, who attributes her affinity for flavor-infusing spices to her Eastern heritage.
Tricia Nash, executive pastry chef at the MotorCity Casino Hotel, Detroit, Michigan, agrees that the idea is to provide accent flavors without scaring or intimidating customers. Nash has been using herbs like basil and lavender as complementary components in her desserts since she started 12 years ago, she says.
“With herbs, sometimes you are looking for that pop of color with the green, but the flavor has to make sense,” she notes, mentioning that ingredients like basil or sage go well with sour fruits, like pineapple or mango.
In addition, “we use cardamom for the dipping sauce for our beignets, and a lot of powder spices are added to ice creams,” she says.
And going even one step further, “I’ve totally done vegetables,” Nash says, “just not necessarily in dessert presentations.” She tells of a white asparagus ice cream with a green soup as a preparation she did for the other side of the kitchen.
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| Strawberry and tomato gazpacho with basil olive oil, cappuccino foam, basil sorbet and micro mint created by José Macías, pastry chef for Diego, Shibuya and Pearl Restaurants at the MGM Grand Las Vegas. |
Using herbs and vegetables also can offer chefs a more local and seasonal way to flavor their desserts, which in itself is on-trend. Pastry Chef Dan Pino of XIX Nineteen café, bar and restaurant at the Park Hyatt Philadelphia says he uses carrots in his springtime dessert menus. “The flavor profiles of the different organic carrots are just like eating sugar,” he notes.
And for his last summer menu, he incorporated fennel into a chocolate coconut creation. Pino even has candied beets to pair with cheesecake and raspberries. “If you eat them all together it tastes just like cotton candy,” he says. “And I’m not a big beet fan.”
“I’m always looking for new things—for the next challenge,” he continues. “Everything I taste, I always think 'How can I use this in a dessert?’”
Spicing Up Plain Old Chocolate
“When you put a little spice into a chocolate dessert, it’s not too savory—it just complements the whole thing, so why not use it?” Marshall asks rhetorically.
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| Hyatt Regency Monterrey, California, Pastry Chef Julliet Marshall. |
Other pastry chefs are on the same page, as they look to differentiate their desserts by highlighting the darker, more bitter and more savory sides of chocolate.
“A lot of times with chocolate, we’ll do different types of salt to bring out the flavors,” Nash says. “Salt absolutely enhances flavor of chocolate.”
“Pepper and chocolate [also] go well together,” adds Macías, and “curries with chocolate are great,” Pino says.
Christophe Laurent, professor of gastronomy, arts and culture at École hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland, says mixing spices and chocolate is really nothing new, but that this is done more cautiously in Europe, especially in Switzerland, because of chocolate’s purity there.
But Nash sees nothing wrong with using spices to enhance the pure flavors of chocolate, and believes that guests appreciate the effort. “Customers want strong flavors,” she says. You can always find some type of chocolate mousse on the menu at any fine restaurant. But if you enhance with spice, [it can differentiate you, and] it’s still a chocolate mousse.”
Direct comments to: derek.gale@reedbusiness.com
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Pastry Chef Dan Pino of XIX Nineteen café, bar and restaurant at the Park Hyatt Philadelphia incorporated some of his favorite beers into a special menu of sweet creations that he offered as part of Philadelphia Beer Week last month.
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