• Introduction
• Dessert Nutrition Pointers
• Strategies for Healthful Desserts
• Steal These Ideas
• Retreat Photos
• Sponsors
• Program Schedule

Steal These Ideas

Let's get specific. What can you do in your own pastry kitchen to enhance the healthfulness of your desserts while still providing all the pleasure your guests expect?

The leading pastry chefs convening at Greystone shared dozens of techniques and tips. Here are some highlights:

Play with the pastry flip

Consider shifting the balance on some desserts so that the indulgent element is a supporting player, not the lead. With this approach, you don't have to alter or compromise the indulgence; just serve less of it. Serve poached fruit with a thin slice of full-fat cheesecake or gingerbread or some bite-size ginger cookies. Michel Stroot made madeleines with cake batter so spa guests had the pleasure of cake but in miniature.

Offer small-plates

Diners love the chance to have a lot of little tastes, as with tapas. At Seasons 52, with six locations in Florida and Atlanta, guests are presented with a tray of what the restaurant calls "mini-indulgences." Individual prices are low, so almost every diner orders at least one treat.

For the guest, tiny desserts encourage experimentation and make it possible to satisfy a sweet tooth without overindulgence.

Explore sous vide

"We're very fruit-centric," says Lincoln Carson of his Las Vegas kitchen. "Sous vide helps me to be true to the flavors of fruit. I can poach fruit without adding anything." Poaching a pear sous vide preserves maximum flavor, says Carson. It draws out juices without added sugar. The pear maintains its integrity, and storage is easy.

Replace butter with nut oils

Roasted nut oils have great depth of flavor and can substitute for butter in some desserts, especially in place of brown butter. Michael Laiskonis keeps roasted peanut oil in a squeeze bottle to finish desserts. How about a toasted walnut-oil cake or financiers with almond oil? Pichet Ong adds almond oil to his gelatin-set almond milk pudding.

Keep plumped dried fruit on hand

You may be surprised at the spur-of-the-moment uses you find. Sherry Yard says she always keeps raisins "plumped up and available." Experiment with soaking mediums, too. Yard plumps raisins in coffee and adds them to chocolate cookies, then uses the soaking liquid to brush cakes, or reduces it for sauce.

Get whole grains in the bread basket

Diners appreciate choice. In addition to a baguette or white roll, offer a whole-grain option. ConAgra has developed a whole-wheat flour that yields baked goods with a white-flour appearance. (The bran is micronized.) If a white bread is more appropriate for your operation, you can bake breads with the visual attributes your customers expect but with the nutritional benefits of whole wheat.

Make a "fruit stock"

Pichet Ong and Daniel Tay, a pastry chef in Singapore, say that Chinese desserts can provide inspiration for chefs looking for healthy ideas. Chinese chefs often make syrups and "stocks" using a variety of dried fruits, roots, seeds and spices. Dried persimmon, dried longan, dried red dates and lotus seeds are among the traditional Asian ingredients in these flavorful "soups," which can be served hot or cold. Can you play with this idea in a non-Asian operation, using dried apricots, plums and pears, for example? Lincoln Carson makes a "consommé" for his passion fruit panna cotta by steeping lemongrass, citrus zest, kaffir lime leaf and vanilla bean in a Muscat wine syrup.

Experiment with hydrocolloids

These fascinating compounds—agar, carrageenan, pectin, gelatin, xanthum gum and the like—give pastry chefs more tools for creativity. They are stabilizers and "texturants," adding mouthfeel that might otherwise come from egg yolks and cream. Some are heat soluble; others are cold soluble. Some perform better in high pH mixtures, some in low pH mixtures. They can prevent the weeping that often occurs when you thaw a frozen pie, so the crust doesn't dampen. And they are widely used in Southeast Asia to make refreshing fruit gels and puddings.

Getting the most out of hydrocolloids in the pastry kitchen may require some trial and error. You need to know the strength of these materials and how to hydrate them. You need a hyper-accurate scale because careful weighing is critical. Suppliers can advise you about the properties of these ingredients so that you can use them most effectively. But pastry chefs who have worked with them, like Bill Yosses at Josephs Citarella restaurant and Bôi in New York City, find them useful in gelées, mousses, foams, coulis and creams.

Have some fun with your menu

Create your own categories, as Sherry Yard has done at Spago, where desserts are classified as either "farmers' market," "Austrian imports" or "chocolate." A farmers' market category is an appealing way to introduce fruit desserts without stigmatizing them as healthy. At the Earth & Ocean restaurant in the W Hotel in Seattle, executive pastry chef Sue McCown often gives her creations cryptic or whimsical names to spark interest, especially if they're not selling under more conventional titles. One recent hit: Sex, Lies & Apricots, a warm apricot-filled pastry with amaretto ice cream.

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