How bread has become the star of dessert

Since humans have made bread, we have been looking for ways to use the remains. In medieval Europe, Thrifty cooks began to soften the obsolete ends with boiling water, add sugar and spices and cooking the mixture in the bread pudding. Since then, almost all culinary crops have developed its own turn on the recipe: in France, dried slices are transformed into lost pain via a soaking of cream and a pan; In the Middle East, hardened remains are relaunched with rose water syrup to make the treat known like Aish El Saraya; In Vietnam, one day breads are mixed with bananas and coconut milk to form the dough of a succulent cake called Banh Chuoi Nuong; And in India and Pakistan, there is Shahi Tukra, a decadent sweet made by bathing sizzles in milk infused with saffron.

Despite their disparate flavors, all these dishes depend essentially on the same method: using dry bread as a sponge to absorb the tasty liquid. Now, however, pastry chefs design other strategies to transform yesterday’s bread into this evening. Perhaps the most popular is to make ice. Brilliantly, an Italian restaurant in Amsterdam, chef Maddy Caldwell, 24, toast the Focaccia and grinds it in crumbs, mixing them in milk and sugar to form a soft service base. At Lyle’s in London, where she was the pastry head until the end of last year, Clodagh Manning, 28, started her version with sourdough, infusing crusts in milk and cream, which she frozen, barattated and garnished with marmalade, wheat berries, burnt vanilla berries and gain in the olive oil.

Hannah Ziskin, 37, co -owner and pastry chef of quarters of fire, a pizzeria in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles, underlines that bread can add more than cream flavor. Gluten, she notes, is a natural stabilizer, conferring an “ultracreamy” texture. For more than a decade, Ziskin has made tiles inspired by the flavors of French toast and the manufacture of sweet porridge from rassy baked pieces with milk – a technique that she picked up while working at the San Francisco Tartine bar. “Historically, you do bread pudding,” she says. “But there is little bread pudding that you can make.” Its latest creation, a hot caramel sundae with sourdough ice cream and a salty crunch, is both a waste, not an effort and a wink to the master of its restaurant: pizza crust with sourdough.

According to Ziskin, the recent increase in bread -based desserts has roots at the pandemic era, when the boom in sourdough and the costs of the rising sellers have forced more restaurants to start cook internally. The process with a high intensity of labor, she says, “takes all day”, motivating the chiefs to avoid throwing unused breads in the dumpster. Caroline Schiff, New York pastry shop, 39 years old, and author of “The Sweet Side of Sournough” (2021), recently used crisp bread bundles as a crunchy garnish for Pavlova and Cheesecake. For a charity event at the Moon Rabbit Rabbit in Washington, DC, she caramelized a brioche for a day and served it with whipped ricotta, strawberries and basil, presenting it as a soft touch on the cheese and cucumber cream sandwiches. “There is not really reason why we would not want to incorporate (bread) into the dessert,” she said, praising her ability to add a variety of textures to a dish, from cream to – when it is hooked in a delicate saucepan.

It is the traditional Sicilian association of Brioche with Granita which inspired the chief and developer of recipes based in London, Alessandro Giannatempo, 25, to create his latest ramp makeup: a braided Challah cone filled with candied kumquats and semifreddo honey. “You use bread as a spoon, perfect for collecting the just fusion semi-melting,” explains Giannatempo, who created the dish not to reuse food waste but rather as a tribute to the multifaceted nature of bread. It is attracted by the cotton texture of Challah, the robust structure and the shiny finish, and is also a big fan of breadcrumbs, which he uses in a wide variety of dishes, including as thickening in the soups and to crust for his tensile pies. It is a story similar to quarters of sheets, where dinner could consist of an aperitif of bread soup based on beans in gigant, focaccia and cherry peppers; a leaven pizza; And a last lesson with Ziskin says: “Bread in ice cream and bread on top.” Los Angeles, formerly the heart of gluten phobia, has traveled a long way.

Photo assistant: Imogen-Blue Hinojosa. Define the designer’s assistant: Jali Parris