Pastries

I remember when I came up with the idea for this dessert and surprised myself by how good it was! Of course, it’s nice to have a pastry chef on hand who can translate my daydreams into reality. But this one is easy enough for anyone. Try using frozen puff pastry sheets if you don’t want to mess with the phyllo dough.

With a creamy, spicy filling that stars a beloved Louisiana ingredient, these crispy, delicate little turnovers will be a hit at any party. I love how the curry plays off the sweet crayfish and flavors of the herbs and scallions. You might double this recipe and freeze half for a future get-together (or light supper when paired with a big salad or spinach omelet). Chances are you will be craving these turnovers again soon after you make them.

These treats aren’t fancy; they’re just plain good and full of memories. You can prepare the strawberries up to a day ahead, but wait until just before serving the dessert to assemble it.

We use phyllo dough in this recipe to make a tasty little dessert that is almost like mini baklavas. They’re perfect for parties because you can pick them up easily and they aren’t messy. The only problem is, you’ll have to make lots because they go like hotcakes!

These turnovers are delicious! Plus, they’re quick to make and everyone loves them. When you’re making them, be sure to put only a few cherries and a little bit of sauce in each one; otherwise, they’ll be really hard to close and they’ll leak all over the place.

When I’ve made spanikopita in the past, it’s been for appetizers, so I make them a lot smaller. Everyone likes them, but they are incredibly tedious to make. These are bigger and much easier and quicker to make. Just be careful if you happen to be eating them in the car on the way somewhere, because they definitely leave crumbs all over.

Heavily influenced by the cuisine and culture of the Middle Kingdom, Viet cooks prepare many classic Chinese sweets, including these cookies. Although Chinese almond cookies are available at Asian bakeries and markets, I prefer to make them myself to ensure that they are full of real almond flavor. The cookies are slightly crispy at the edges and tender in the middle, and have a nice rich color from the glaze. I often make a double batch of this dough and freeze the extra, along with some whole blanched almonds, so that I can simply thaw the dough and bake it up when I crave the cookies.

The easy availability of butter in America was a boon for my mother, who saw endless possibilities for perfecting French pâtés chaud, large puff pastry rounds filled with an aromatic meat mixture. She regularly made the rich pastries from scratch, and they were standard breakfast fare for my siblings and me growing up. As adults, we have scaled back our consumption, making the pastries smaller and serving them as finger food on special occasions. Shaping tiny round pastries is laborious, so we form logs and cut them into diamonds. Unlike my mom, I don’t have the patience or time to make my own puff pastry. Instead, I rely on a local bakery for frozen sheets of all-butter puff pastry or use the frozen puff pastry sold at supermarkets. The latter are usually sold two sheets to a box, with each sheet weighing about 1/2 pound and measuring about ten inches square.

OK, in my wildest dreams I couldn’t come up with a more perfect dessert for myself. Bourbon, ice cream, buttermilk, pecans, and light, buttery-crispy profiteroles; it doesn’t get any better for me (except for maybe the Blueberry Lemon Crêpes, page 198 . . . oh, and the Blackberry Soufflé, page 196). For some reason my sweet tooth always leans toward anything southern, and anything with bourbon in it is all right by me.

These are everything a good buttermilk biscuit should be: light, flaky, and exceedingly tender. They make appearances all over the menu at Bar Americain; they’re a fought-over item in our bread basket, the basis of Miss Stephanie’s Biscuits and Cream Gravy (page 223), and when I’m not feeling the waffles, the perfect accompaniment for fried chicken (page 131). A liberal dusting of black pepper gives the biscuits a subtle flush of heat that distinguishes them from the rest. The purists among you can leave out this last step if you prefer your biscuits free of adornment—they’re still melt-in-your-mouth good.

Cooked sweet potato adds body and flavor to these biscuits, but they are more savory than sweet—just right for buttering and sopping up gravy of any kind. Try them with Not Really Son-of-a-Bitch Stew (page 221), Tom Perini’s Chicken-fried Steak (page 227), or Beer-braised Short Ribs (page 222).

I’ve been making these for parties ever since I joined forces with my old friend Marianna Green. We both had little babies, and together we catered weddings, birthday parties, and more parties. I froze these two-bite nibbles by the dozen—I always had a batch on standby for last-minute events. They’re still one of my favorite party hors d’oeuvres. No fuss, no muss, no sauce needed.

My friends Larry Butler and Carol Ann Sayle, owners of Boggy Creek Farm in Austin, sell the most fabulous smoked tomatoes. I’ve used them to enhance meat dishes and salads. But I’d never tried them in a bread or scone, so I came up with this recipe to showcase them. As soon as the first fragrant scone came out of the oven, I knew I’d be delighted with the result. I even devised a way to use the day-old scones to stuff my Three Pigs pork tenderloin (page 33). As much as I love Larry’s smoked tomatoes, I must admit the scones are delicious made with any high-quality sun dried tomatoes.

In February 2008, I traveled with Dave to Deauville, France, for the third annual Omnivore Food Festival. The two of us were like fish out of water in this off-season beach town. Straight off the plane from New York and jet-lagged, we were left to our own devices in the tiny, remote town to gather Asian ingredients for a kimchi demo. We agreed to wake up at 6 a.m. the next day to get breakfast and get going. We met drowsy and confused in the empty hotel lobby and proceeded to sleepwalk through the ghost town until we could smell fresh-baked bread and saw a light on in the only bakery in town. Dave took charge and pointed at nearly everything in the joint, as that’s how we eat when we’re abroad. “I’m full” is not a phrase you’re allowed to use—such is the price of traveling with chef Dave Chang. We found a bench outside and unwrapped this mound of bread that looked like it had some sort of creamy gravy inside. Still half-asleep, we wrestled the filled bread ball out of the bag and bit in. When you are having a food moment, it’s like tasting food for the first time. Your eyes open wide and then close, as if in slow motion. You chew as if no food with flavor has ever touched your tongue before and what you are eating at that very moment is what will shape all future food opinions you will ever have. That was our 6:05 a.m. February morning in Deauville. Neither of us speaks French, so we decided to call it what it was, a volcano—an explosion of potato, lardons, and cheese like no other. We raced each other to the bakery every subsequent morning that week. And on the plane ride home, we agreed that if and when we opened a bakery, it must serve our very own volcano.

This is the first croissant we ever made and sold at Milk Bar. Deeply stinky and pungent in all the right ways, it is not for the faint of heart. It is a true marriage of funky, barnyardy, stringent kimchi and blue cheese, of our Korean roots to our Italian ones. It is for our soul sisters and brothers. Making croissants is one of the coolest bread techniques around. You spend time making many layers of bread dough and butter, folding and turning the dough all along. When baked, the croissants get their flakiness and volume from the steam that the layers of butter give off as the dough heats. The steam separates each dough layer ever so slightly, resulting in this massively puffy, impossibly flaky creation. And when you make them with a flavored butter, they’re even cooler! Though we have simplified the technique somewhat at Milk Bar, in terms of speed and precision, this recipe is still not for softbodies. It takes more time with the dough, more flour, more time with the rolling pin. But it will make you feel like a true pro when the oven timer goes off and you pull these bad boys out.

Have you ever had a turkey croissandwich on an airplane, or in a country club, or at a catered corporate event? The ones made with mass-produced croissants and stuffed with turkey cut in half? We always want to like them, but they’re always so disappointing. So we came up with one we love. The mustard croissant is very similar to the kimchi croissant in technique, but it is stuffed with meat, cheese, and condiments instead of blue cheese. You can substitute your favorite meat-and-cheese sandwich combo, if you prefer, for the turkey and Swiss.

These delectable muffins are so rich they can be served with nothing more than a large green salad for a luncheon.

In the restaurant, we serve our guests hot cheese biscuits and hoecake cornbread at lunchtime, but at dinner we swap out the hoecakes for these wonderful melt-in-your-mouth corn muffins.