For as long as humans have been making bread, we’ve been looking for ways to use up the leftovers. In medieval Europe, thrifty cooks began softening stale ends with boiling water, adding sugar and spices and baking the mixture into bread pudding. In the time since, nearly every culinary culture has developed its own spin on the recipe: In France, dried-out slices are transformed into pain perdu via a custard soak and a pan fry; in the Middle East, toughened scraps are revived with rosewater syrup to make the treat known as aish el saraya; in Vietnam, day-old loaves are blended with bananas and coconut milk to form the batter of a succulent cake called banh chuoi nuong; and in India and Pakistan, there’s shahi tukra, a decadent sweet made by bathing sizzled slices in saffron-infused milk.
Their disparate flavors notwithstanding, all of these dishes rely on essentially the same method: using desiccated bread as a sponge to soak up flavorful liquid. Now, however, pastry chefs are devising other strategies for transforming yesterday’s loaf into tonight’s dessert. Perhaps the most popular is making ice cream. At Brio, an Italian restaurant in Amsterdam, the chef Maddy Caldwell, 24, toasts leftover focaccia and grinds it into crumbs, blending them into milk and sugar to form a soft serve base. At Lyle’s in London, where she was the head pastry chef until late last year, Clodagh Manning, 28, started her version with sourdough, infusing the crusts into milk and cream, which she froze, churned and topped with marmalade, wheat berries, burnt vanilla Chantilly and wafer-thin bread wisps toasted in olive oil.
Hannah Ziskin, 37, a co-owner and the pastry chef of Quarter Sheets, a pizzeria in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, points out that bread can add more than just flavor to ice cream. Gluten, she notes, is a natural stabilizer, imparting an “ultracreamy” texture. For over a decade, Ziskin has been baking tuiles inspired by the flavors of French toast and making sweet porridge from stale pieces cooked down with milk — a technique that she picked up while working at San Francisco’s Bar Tartine. “Historically, you make bread pudding out of it,” she says. “But there’s only so much bread pudding you can make.” Her latest creation, a hot caramel sundae featuring sourdough ice cream and a salty-sweet breadcrumb crunch, is both a waste-not, want-not effort and a nod to her restaurant’s master ingredient: sourdough pizza crust.
According to Ziskin, the recent surge in bread-based desserts has roots in the pandemic era, when the sourdough boom and rising vendor costs compelled more restaurants to start baking in-house. The labor-intensive process, she says, “takes all day,” motivating chefs to avoid tossing unused loaves in the dumpster. Caroline Schiff, the 39-year-old New York-based pastry chef and author of “The Sweet Side of Sourdough” (2021), has lately been using crisp slivers of bread as a crunchy garnish for both Pavlova and cheesecake. For a charity event at Moon Rabbit restaurant in Washington, D.C., she caramelized day-old brioche and served it with whipped ricotta, strawberries and basil, presenting it as a sweet twist on cream cheese-and-cucumber sandwiches. “There’s not really a reason why we wouldn’t want to incorporate [bread] into dessert,” she says, praising its ability to add a variety of textures to a dish, from custardy lushness to — when crisped in a pan — delicate crunch.
It was the traditional Sicilian pairing of brioche with granita that inspired the London-based chef and recipe developer Alessandro Giannatempo, 25, to create his latest bready confection: a cone of braided challah filled with candied kumquats and honey semifreddo. “You use the bread as a spoon, perfect for scooping up the just-melting semifreddo,” says Giannatempo, who created the dish not to repurpose food waste but rather as a homage to the multifaceted nature of bread. He’s drawn to challah’s cottony texture, sturdy structure and shiny finish, and is also a big fan of breadcrumbs, which he uses in a wide variety of dishes, including as a thickener in soups and to make the crust for his treacle tarts. It’s a similar story at Quarter Sheets, where dinner might consist of a bread soup appetizer made with gigante beans, focaccia and cherry peppers; a sourdough pizza; and a final course featuring, Ziskin says, “bread in the ice cream and bread on top.” Los Angeles, once the heart of gluten phobia, has come a long way.
Photo assistant: Imogen-Blue Hinojosa. Set designer’s assistant: Jali Parris
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