Blackberry

This is a quick sauce that’s not overly sweet. Serve it over cake, ice cream, or yogurt. Strawberries, mulberries, blackberries, raspberries, and boysenberries will all work well, either on their own or mixed. For a piquant sauce, be sure to use sweet, full-flavored berries.

Sabayon is the French name for zabaglione, a light foamy Italian dessert. It is served warm in glasses or coupes or spooned over a dessert, fruit, or pastry as a topping. Traditionally, it is made with Marsala or port, but it may be prepared using other wines and liqueurs. Use the freshest berries in season. Try all the same berry, or mix them up for a colorful treat.

Coulis is a fancy word that simply means a sauce made with fresh, uncooked ingredients. Feel free to change the mix of berries as you wish, depending on what’s available. If you find fresh red currants at your market, the tangy little berries are a wonderful addition.

When I moved into my first home in San Francisco, the backyard was teeming with blackberry bushes. Blinded by greed, I was thrilled at the prospect of having as many luscious blackberries as I wanted. But as I soon learned, blackberry bushes are a mixed blessing, and for the next few years I spent many thorny weekends working to thwart the persistent shrubs from advancing and taking over my entire yard. Luckily, the bonus was indeed lots and lots of inky blackberries all summer long. But each and every one I picked was well earned, and I still have some battle scars to prove it.

You can tell a lot about people by looking in their freezer. Next time you’re at a friend’s house, peek in theirs and you’ll discover their most hidden desires. One secret I am willing to share is that I’m hopelessly frugal and it’s impossible for me to throw anything away, no matter how trivial. One day when I had lots of blackberries on hand, I pulled out one of my buried treasures, a small container of frozen lime juice left over from an overanxious lime-buying spree. I was curious about how the tart lime juice would play against the sweet blackberries. Happily, it was a great combination, and it’s one secret I don’t need to keep to myself. Although I recommend that you use freshly squeezed juice, frozen lime juice that you’ve kept well concealed is the next best thing.

I’m a firm believer in being very nice to the people who feed me, which comes from working in restaurants and seeing what can happen to people who aren’t. I have a particular soft spot for the young folks at my local fish market, who wake early each morning to unpack, bone, and clean icy cold fish all day long. Since their freezer has a much larger capacity than mine, and their capacity for eating ice cream follows suit, I got into the habit of bringing them lots of ice creams and sorbets. Each time I’d bring them another flavor, they’d drop whatever work they were doing, rip off the lid, and dig right in. They liked this Raspberry Swirl Ice Cream the most, and it earned me VIP status instantly. Since that day, I’ve gotten the quickest and most helpful service of anyone who shops at that fish store. This perplexes the other shoppers, who have no idea of the power of homemade ice cream. For best results, layer the just-churned ice cream with the raspberry swirl and avoid stirring it to preserve the colorful contrast between the frozen vanilla custard and the gorgeous swirl of raspberries.

This very glossy, deeply colored sauce is especially good with Vanilla Ice Cream (page 143), but it also shines brightly alongside a fruit tart or a summer fruit galette.

Up until a few years ago, white peaches and nectarines were an oddity in America and finding them was nearly impossible. Happily, they’ve now become fairly common, and you can spot them in grocery stores and farmers’ markets across the land. Their flavor is not as intense as their yellow counterparts, but their delicacy is part of their appeal. Also appealing is how when white nectarines are cooked with their skins and then puréed, the finished mixture is an ivory hue with a faint touch of rosy pink. I came up with this dessert when I was the pastry chef at Monsoon, an Asian restaurant run by Bruce Cost, one of the best cooks I’ve ever met in my life. Unlike American dinners, most Asian meals don’t end with a full-on dessert. So my challenge was to create desserts that customers would find appealing enough to order after sharing spicy, authentic, and sometimes challenging fare—like the turtle soup served with raw turtle eggs floating on the surface, or the sea slugs that tasted (slightly) better than they looked. I had to make sure the desserts would bring people back from whatever culinary precipice we took them to. This fruit sorbet, resting in a five-spice cookie cup and served with berries steeped in sweet plum wine, was the perfect landing pad.

One late summer weekend, I was visiting a friend who lives in the wilds of Northern California, and I noticed lots of wild blackberry bushes with berries that were so plump and ripe that they were practically falling off the branches. I can never resist free food, so I set out for an afternoon of heavy picking. When I came back, my basket loaded down with fresh berries, my friend casually asked, “Did you see the rattlesnakes?” “Um . . . no, I . . . I didn’t,” I replied. Actually, I was really glad to have missed them. That incident didn’t quite scare me away from picking other types of fruits and berries, but I’ll let others risk their lives for blackberries, which I’ve been happy to plunk down money for ever since that day.

There was an expression—“too good to use”—at a certain well-known restaurant where I used to work. One of the cooks coined the phrase to describe what we, the pastry people, would do: hoard beautiful fruits and berries, buying much more than we could possibly use. We considered the fruits so precious that we’d hold off using them, waiting for something very special or just the right moment. Eventually, though, we’d find ourselves with a glut on our hands and had to scramble to use up our stash before it went bad. If you find yourself in a similar position or if you’re just looking for the great summer dessert loaded with lots of juicy berries, this is it. And if anyone says your summer pudding looks too good to eat, don’t believe them. Just dig right in.

The almond-scented French cakes known as financiers are traditionally baked in small rectangular shapes meant to resemble bars of gold. Unless you’re loaded, you likely don’t have 12 fancy, expensive French rectangular baking molds lying around, so I’ve adapted this recipe for baking in a standard-size muffin tin, which works beautifully—and won’t lead you to finanicial ruin.

If you’re as wild about berries as I am, you’ll find that this pie is the height of luxury and one of the season’s greatest treats. It’s a dessert that I make only in the summer, at the moment when berries are abundant and at their peak. When I lived in San Francisco, I’d drive east across the bay to Monterey Market in Berkeley where flats of berries were so plentiful—and so inexpensive—that I found it impossible not to come home with at least a few piled up in my trunk. In addition to turning the berries into jams, compotes, and sorbets, I’d always bake this pie. A total of 6 cups of berries makes up the filling—use whichever types you prefer. Unless you buy berries by the flat, like I did, most berries are sold in half-pint or pint baskets, so expect to have some leftover fruit, which I know you’ll put to good use. I always did.

The Greek-style yogurt provides a creamy consistency for this paleta, so you’ll have a rich mouthfeel without any of the guilt. This combination is really quite classic, but feel free to replace the blackberries with any other berry. If you want a marbled paleta, put the blackberries in a blender and sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar to taste (just a little sweet) and whirl. Pour the mixture into the molds after adding the yogurt mixture, swirling with a skewer while you pour (see page 42).

A few hours outside of Mexico City lies the lakeside town of Valle de Bravo. Many people escape there for the weekend to get some fresh air and enjoy the lake and the chilly mornings in the mountains. We had some family friends who had a country house there. What I looked forward to most when we visited were the incredible wild blackberries, bursting with juice and with a slight tartness that I loved. I always had blackberry smoothies for breakfast and as many of these paletas as I could get. In this recipe, the mixture isn’t strained. Part of the awesomeness is enjoying the little seeds in every bite.

This is a simple, elegant, not-too-sweet dessert that you can whip up in no time. I recommend using Bosc or Anjou pears in this recipe, because they hold their shape when baked.

Blackberries are so tasty, and so good for you! Packed full of fiber and antioxidants, they are definitely a “superfood.” This dessert is tart and sweet. If you like it more tart, add another tablespoon of lime juice.

These tasty, not-too-sweet muffins are packed with protein-rich quinoa and plenty of antioxidant-rich fruit. Add a glass of calcium-enriched OJ or rice milk, and you have a complete breakfast.

This is an easy-to-assemble pie that really takes us back to our childhoods. Blackberries grow wild all over Georgia, and coming from a family of great pie bakers, we were always motivated to pick them.

I always remember my childhood summers in Vermont as a procession of summer puddings made with raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, or currants as they came along. This old-fashioned dessert couldn’t be simpler to put together, and you can do a single portion in a small cup mold. You can even make Summer Pudding in winter when you may have bought from the local street stand more berries imported from South America than you can eat up.

I usually make these in the summer, when berries are plentiful and bursting with flavor. I gather the berries and put all the ingredients out the night before, and it takes but a few minutes to whip up the batter. Then there’s time to go for a swim and work up an appetite while the muffins bake. If you have family and guests around, just double the recipe. This more modest amount will give you a dozen mini-muffins, which I prefer, plus two regular-sized ones that I bake in small Pyrex cups. If you don’t eat them all, they freeze well.