Product Description

A refreshing change in every respect

When you are working with great ingredients, you want to keep it simple. You don’t want to blur flavor by overcomplicating. This is why Pure Dessert, from the beloved Alice Medrich, offers the simplest of recipes, using the fewest ingredients in the most interesting ways. There are no glazes, fillings, or frostings—just dessert at its purest, most elemental, and most flavorful.

Alice deftly takes us places we haven’t been, using, for example, whole grains, usually reserved for breads, to bring a lovely nutty quality to cookies and strawberry shortcake. Pound cake takes on a new identity with a touch of olive oil and sherry. Unexpected cheeses make divine soufflés. Chestnut flour and walnuts virtually transform meringue. Varietal honeys and raw sugars infuse ice creams and sherbets with delectable new flavor.

Inspired choices of ingredients are at the heart of this collection of entirely new recipes: sesame brittle ice cream, corn-flour tuiles with tangy sea salt and a warming bite of black pepper, honey caramels, strawberries with single-malt sabayon.

To witness Alice’s idea-stream as she describes how she arrived at each combination is to instantly understand why three of her books have won Best Cookbook of the Year. She’s an experimenter, tinkerer, and sleuth, fascinated with trial and error, with the effects of small changes in recipes, exploring combinations tirelessly and making remarkable discoveries. Does cold cream or hot cream do a better job coaxing out the flavor of mint leaves or rose petals? Why is it that dusting a warm brownie with spices gives it an enticing aromatic nose, whereas putting the spice in the batter blurs the chocolate flavor? Do cooked strawberries or raw make for the better sorbet?

Loaded with advice and novel suggestions, with great recipes and eye-catching, full-color photographs that show off these simple, straightforward desserts, Pure Dessert is an education and a revelation. Thank you, Alice!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48034 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
If vanilla is your idea of plain, Medrich will revolutionize your thinking. In her vocabulary, vanilla is a flavor; she distinguishes among the nuances of Bourbon, Mexican, and Tahitian extracts, powders, and beans. Plain means tasting the milk, butter, flour or fresh cheese that defines a cake or custard. She describes 10 different sugars, from "neutral" granulated white to slightly "smoky" dark brown piloncillo. Her three previous cookbooks (including BitterSweet) won awards from the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and her new book is sure to attract the new generation of cooks devoted to elaborate simplicity. Readers should be aware, however, that the brevity of ingredient lists may mislead; some gardens and markets may lack such nonfungible items as lemon verbena, chestnut flour and muscovado sugar. But all will welcome the ultimate summer pudding recipe-berries, bread, sugar, whipped cream-and the liberating range of frozen desserts.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Sure to attract the new generation of cooks devoted to elaborate simplicity"—Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly )

From the Inside Flap
A refreshing change in every respect

When you are working with great ingredients, you want to keep it simple. You don’t want to blur flavor by overcomplicating. This is why Pure Dessert, from the beloved Alice Medrich, offers the simplest of recipes, using the fewest ingredients in the most interesting ways. There are no glazes, fillings, or frostings—just dessert at its purest, most elemental, and most flavorful.

Alice deftly takes us places we haven’t been using, for example, whole grains, usually reserved for breads, to bring a lovely nutty quality to cookies and strawberry shortcake. Pound cake takes on a new identity with a touch of olive oil and sherry. Unexpected cheeses make divine soufflés. Chestnut flour and walnuts virtually transform meringue. Varietal honeys and raw sugars infuse ice creams and sherbets with delectable new flavor.

Inspired choices of ingredients are at the heart of this collection of entirely new recipes: sesame brittle ice cream, corn-flour tuiles with tangy sea salt and a warming bite of black pepper, honey caramels, strawberries with single-malt sabayon.

To witness Alice’s idea-stream as she describes how she arrived at each combination is to instantly understand why three of her books have won Best Cookbook of the Year. She’s an experimenter, tinkerer, and sleuth, fascinated with trial and error, with the effects of small changes in recipes, exploring combinations tirelessly and making remarkable discoveries. Does cold cream or hot cream do a better job coaxing out the flavor of mint leaves or rose petals? Why is it that dusting a warm brownie with spices gives it an enticing aromatic nose, whereas putting the spice in the batter blurs the chocolate flavor? Do cooked strawberries or raw make for the better sorbet?

Loaded with advice and novel suggestions, with great recipes and eye-catching, full-color photographs that show off these simple, straightforward desserts, Pure Dessert is an education and a revelation. Thank you, Alice!ert can be, focusing on fewer but finer ingredients and using them in fresh ways.

Customer Reviews

Almost perfect
His is a beautiful and inspirational cookbook. It's only flaw is a lack of photos. There are some beautiful photos, but they aren't labeled and they don't always correspond to the recipe on the facing page making it frustrating to try and figure out which recipe the photo is referencing. Ideally a cookbook should have photos of all the recipes in the book. Then again this may not be important to everyone.

Extremely satisfying
Organized by flavors (milk, sugar, fruit, nuts and so on), this book creates exquisitely simple and incredibly satisfying recipes. In a nut shell, Alice Medrich rocks. I wasn;t blown away by the chapter on milk and fruit, but the nuts and grains recipe are fantastic. Particularly, the recipes for Nibby buckwheat cookies and the Italian chocolate almond torte never fail to please guests and hostess alike ;-)

Pure Dessert: A Focus on Flavor
I like the author's focus on using the best ingredients and simplifying recipes to allow the flavor of individual ingredients to shine.

Chapters include Before You Start (which includes recommendations on ingredients and equipment); the Flavors of Milk; Flavors of Grain, Nuts and Seeds; Flavors of Fruit; Flavors of Chocolate; Flavors of Honey and Sugar; Flavors of Herbs and Spices, Flowers and Leaves; and Flavors of Wine, Beer and Spirits.

The author's notes for each recipe are interesting, and directions are clear. Many recipes include possible variations, offering the cook even more options. The desserts include cookies, cakes, sherberts, ice creams, tarts, souffles, puddings, and a few more adventurous options (such as Mexican chocolate soup with cinnamon toasts).

Pure Desserts might have received five stars if it included more photos. The color photos featured in the book were beautifully staged, but I wish there had been many more.

This is similar to Baking by Flavor by Lisa Yokelson, but I would recommend Pure Dessert between the two.