One of the nation’s most influential pastry chefs names her ten favorite ingredients, and why.
Emily Luchetti rose to prominence as the executive pastry chef of San Francisco’s late, great Stars restaurant and now oversees the dessert programs at Farallon and Waterbar. She’s also the author of six cookbooks, most recently The Fearless Baker.
Toqueland has a confession to make: We don’t know as much about the sweet science of pastry as we do about what goes on over on the hot line. With that in mind, we picked Luchetti’s brain at length recently. (She also laid a copy of The Fearless Baker on us and we highly recommend it for its supportive tone and powers of demystification.) A longer interview will follow before too long, but for the time being, here’s a little snack to hold you over, our sophomore edition of Toqueland Ten:
Emily Luchetti (photo by Gene Kosoy; courtesy Waterbar)
1. Caramel. “Caramel. Caramel sauce. Caramel anything. (You have to make caramel, but once you make it, I consider it an ingredient.) It’s a flavor that goes with every other pastry ingredient, whether it’s chocolate, whether it’s nuts, whether it’s citrus. It can be a subtle flavor or can be really strong, dominant, driving flavor.” You don’t have to change the recipe for to achieve the different effects, says Luchetti: “It’s how you deploy it.”
2. Bittersweet chocolate. “If I had to pick one, I’d pick something around 64 percent [cocoa], because that’s really generic and you can use it in just about anything.”
3. Unsalted butter. “You can’t bake without butter and I always bake with unsalted butter just because it allows you to control the amount of salt in a recipe. I’m not that picky about the brand of butter I use, but the amount of salt in salted butter changes from brand to brand.”
4. Salt. Don’t think of salt as a pasty ingredient? Think again: “It’s crucial to desserts because it brings out the flavors, the same as it does in savory. I use Diamond Crystal kosher salt. A lot of pastry chefs use sea salt, which I think is kind of silly because kosher salt is so much cheaper.” Things would be different if she were talking about finishing salts, in which case she might recommend Maldon or French sea salt, but “I’m just talking about a workhorse salt that goes into cakes and things.”
5. Lemon. Two reasons for this one. The first: “Sometimes you just want a little bit because you want acidity in something; for example, if you’re doing any kind of berry, lemon juice and salt helps bring out the flavors.”
Reason #2: In the bigger picture, lemons offer a window into the menu-writing challenges pastry chefs face at this time of year: “Lemon is a great flavor to have in a dessert, especially in the middle of winter when you’re trying to put a dessert menu out and everything is brown and chocolaty and nutty because there isn’t that much [in season to work with]. So you put something with lemon or citrus on there and it really pops up the menu and gives it a lightness and some color that balances it out much better.” (By the same token, Luchetti doesn’t use lemons as a primary flavor in the summer because there are so many great, bright flavors to choose from; see number 6.)
Luchetti's latest: The Fearless Baker
6. Berries. “I group them all together. When summertime comes and I’m doing menus I order raspberries and blueberries because those are my favorite. But if you can get the real, good small strawberries [I get them, too]. In California, we also get olallieberries, which are in the blackberry family but they’re bigger and plumper and juicier and sweeter. They’re not as tart and sweet. Sometimes when you mix a blackberry into other berries you get a blackberry in your mouth and it’s like getting a SweeTart candy. I like to use combinations of them when I do desserts in the summer. It’s such a quintessential summer dessert. You can use them with a shortcake and lots of things.”
But not anything: “One thing I never do, is put berries with dark chocolate. I hate berries and dark chocolate together. White chocolate’s okay because it’s softer, but for me when I put dark chocolate and berries in my mouth, it’s too acidic; there’s no smoothness or roundness in my mouth. It’s just too intense, even if you have cream or something in there. There aren’t many pastry chefs who don’t like that combination.” (Toqueland confessed that we like to pair berries and Toblerone bars at home and Luchetti gave us a pass. “I’ll allow you to do that,” she said with a laugh. “It’s a milder chocolate and the nuts smooth it out.”)
7. Almonds. “Being in California, we get the most amazing almonds. Peter, my husband, drives up to Sacramento a lot for business and he’ll stop at those big roadside stands where the almonds are grown and you get them for $3.99 a pound and they’re this year’s almonds and I just roast them. It’s such a neutral nut where something like a hazelnut or a pecan is stronger. Everybody likes almonds because they’re not quite so heavy and oily. Most chefs, especially French chefs, will use blanched almonds because they don’t want the skin on, they don’t want that color, they want that pure white. But I like that color contrast. If, say, you’re doing a financier cake, I like that color in there. I don’t like that blondness. I’ll either use a sliced almond or I really like whole, natural almonds that are just toasted because if you chop them up you just get those chunks of texture and crunch, but it depends what you’re using it for.”
For the final word on this subject, Luchetti offers this wonderfully unpretentious for-home tip that weaves together a number of her top ten picks: “One of the best desserts around is vanilla ice cream (you can even buy Häagen-Dazs), put warm, chopped nuts on top, and chocolate pieces, and a little bit of caramel sauce. If you need a last-minute dessert, that’s so easy.”
8. Apricots. “I think apricots are kind of the unsung hero of the fruit world. What’s sad, especially in California where they’re grown, is so many people are pulling out apricots for the past ten years and putting in grapes or other things. When you eat an apricot by itself it doesn’t taste that great, but it just needs a little bit of love and attention. Once you cook it or pair it with something else, the flavors are unleashed and it’s perfumey and delicate and it’s just a great fruit.”
9. Vanilla. Not one for snobbery, Luchetti will use either the bean or the sometimes maligned extract: “I use both. It really depends what you’re going to use it in. If you’re making cookies, vanilla extract is the way to go. It’s easier and it’s cheaper. You’re not going to scrape out a vanilla bean to put in a bunch of chocolate chips, but at the same time you want that background.”
She also has a special appreciation for vanilla when it’s front and center: “If you add vanilla bean to a crème brulee or a panna cotta, without it, it’s just cream and sugar and milk and (in the case of a crème brulee) eggs, but you put vanilla in and all of a sudden it’s this sophisticated thing. Also, I think vanilla ice cream is the hardest ice cream to make; it’s like ice cream unplugged. If you make Rocky Road, or something like that, it’s all about all the stuff in it; you can have a crappy base but it’s got all this stuff in it that makes it taste good. With vanilla, you have to have the right amount, and a lot depends on which beans you pick because there’s Tahitian, there’s Madagascar. There’s nowhere to hide.”
10. Pear. “I would pick pear over apple just because I think pears are under-appreciated. Pear has a sophistication that apple doesn’t. When you roast a pear, more than poaching, it concentrates all those flavors in there and you can use it on top of a dessert or you can use it as a dessert. One of the things we did for New Year’s Eve at Waterbar is we had a honey-vanilla pound cake and we put a honey-roasted pear on top, a whole pear, and we wanted some cream in it, so where the pear was hollowed out to be cored, we filled it with vanilla cream. So when you took that first bite, you saw that there was all this cream inside.”
– Andrew
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