... a spirited celebration of regional food and culinary craft, season by season, with original recipes by Susan S. Bradley
One of the easiest and most effective ways to elevate a simple dessert to epicurean heights is to add a brightly colored, brightly flavored dessert syrup. You can serve a dessert syrup over ice cream or gelato, alongside panna cotta or baked custard, with tea cakes, or as the key flavoring of an Italian soda, lemonade, or limeade (recipe below).
To kick off Northwest strawberry season, here are the tried-and-true recipes from past seasons. Check out the Strawberry Primer first for a wide range of other flavors that partner beautifully with the inestimable Northwest strawberry.
If you’ve been following along with me this summer, you know I am enthralled with the tomato and strawberry flavor pairing. Earlier, I created Fresh Strawberry-Tomato Dessert Sauce to accompany Heavenly Parmesan Sour Cream Pound Cake. It was a surprise hit. I have to explore at least a couple more strawberry-tomato dishes before the summer season is over.
While pondering what to cook next and flagging from the 90+ degree heat wave that hit Seattle this week, the inevitable happened. I opened the oh-so-wonderfully-cold frig and saw, at eye level, a large bowl of strawberries alongside a large bowl of grape tomatoes, both of which were intended for salad.
Portland, Oregon is gelato country. Not ice cream country—jeh-lah-toh country. No matter which direction I set out on my walk each day from Northwest PDX, I pass at least one gelato shop along the way.
The challenge is to walk by without stopping in for “just a taste.” One taste always leads to another taste, which always leads to a scoop each of two complementary flavors–one tart fruit based, the other cream based (as in sweet cream, cream cheese, crème fraiche, buttermilk, yogurt, sour cream, or mascarpone). To my palate, it’s a perfect partnership.
The idea of pairing strawberries with tomatoes originally came to me while perusing one of my favorite culinary sites, FoodPairing, which features dozens of potentially harmonious and sometimes very odd sounding ingredient pairings. (Another great site for this type of exploration is Khymos. Or check out the most comprehensive book ever written on the topic: The Flavor Bible, by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg. It lists thousands of ingredient pairings favored by some of the world’s most acclaimed chefs.)
As I said in the previous post, Caramelized Ancho Chile & Cinnamon Almonds, are you ready for one of the most spectacular desserts I have ever created? It is so indulgent, so bright, so refreshing, so festive, and so sinful (Using fresh strawberries out of season? Have I gone to the dark side?) that it may well be the PERFECT dessert with which to bid winter a grateful farewell. Goodbye freezing rain, mud, ice, and threats of snow. Goodbye short grey days and long dark nights. Have a safe journey to the other side of the globe, and please please please don’t hurry back.
This past spring, I had a salad at Ten01 in Portland, Oregon that rocked my world. It featured micro salad greens, roasted yellow beets, a tangy vinaigrette and a creamy mixture underneath the salad that the kitchen billed as panna cotta. Every time my fork got a bit of that creamy mixture, my palate did a little dance.
If you ask ten people at random to name their favorite berry, eight of them will say, “strawberries of course.” And who’s to argue? In the height of Northwest strawberry season, it’s hard to imagine anything tasting better than these juicy, incredibly sweet, powerfully flavorful berries. They are simply perfection.
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