SUMMER JEWELS: Tips and awesome recipes for making the most of summer’s produce.
Do you remember the first time you tasted a piece of fruit at the peak of its season? When I went to Paris about 20 years ago, I had fresh, wild mara de bois strawberries that absolutely ruined me. The flavor was so potent it was almost artificial. Mara des bois strawberries made the out-of-season, grocery store berries I had been using taste like crunchy water—like La Croix made a strawberry, just the tiniest whisper of fruit flavor and the fruit was also two rooms over.
I haven’t purchased a grocery store strawberry since tasting those life-changing mara des bois. Now, I enjoy them as much as I can in the summertime, when their flavor is at its peak. I get them locally when I can, some of my favorites being from J.R. Organics here in San Diego. They’re so perfect they look cartoonish.
Strawberries so beautiful deserve your respect, so consider this my annual strawberry season PSA: stop cutting the tops off of your strawberries. You’re wasting the fruit. Instead, simply use your fingers to pluck off the greens, or use the tip of a small paring knife to cut around the stem and remove the greens along with any hard, woody core.
You don’t have to throw the strawberry tops away—I like to chop them up and mix them with chopped mint, a little sugar, an absurd amount of freshly cracked black pepper, and balsamic vinegar. Spoon that mixture on top of berries with some fresh whipped cream for an easy dessert that lets summer strawberries shine.
I decided to make sorbet with my latest strawberry haul. I used Mark’s recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, but with one tiny addition—Chinese five spice powder. Just a pinch really pops the strawberry flavor. More is not better here—too much spice may start to take the sorbet in a savory direction. I use The Flavor Bible and The Flavor Thesaurus to get ideas for using spices to enhance fruit flavors.
Any ripe, soft fruit will work for this recipe: just peel, pit, and chop as needed.
Strawberry Sorbet
You can adapt this recipe for any type of soft, ripe fruit—just be sure to peel, chop, and/or pit the fruit as needed. For berries, strain out the seeds for a smoother sorbet. Although Chinese five-spice powder enhances the flavor of berries, you can experiment with other fruit and spice combinations, like blueberries with cardamom or bananas with cloves.
Pita Pizza with Fresh Jam
Inspired by Pop-Tarts, the icon in a category of junky breakfasts known as “toaster pastries,” here’s an equivalent that is (obviously) better for you and almost as simple, especially if you use a toaster oven. In fact, once you prepare the fruit and buy the pita, you’ve got three breakfasts that are toaster-fast (see the variations). Your strawberries may be sweet enough that they don’t even need sugar; taste one before you start to make the jam.
Strawberry-Rhubarb Gratin “Brûlée”
This dessert is a cross between a gratin, a crisp, and a clafoutis, the French dessert of fruit baked in pancake-like batter. Here, I go for the fresh taste of fruit and whipped custard made with heavy cream, along with a lightly sweet and crunchy nut topping. As long as you have 1 1/2 pounds fruit total, substitute whatever you like: Plums, peaches, sour cherries, or blueberries are particularly nice.
Fruit Candy
Many packaged dried fruits are tossed in extra sugar and treated with preservatives, but you can avoid all that by oven-drying the fruit yourself. Though these “candies” are more calorie-dense than an equivalent weight of their raw counterparts—you are, after all, removing most of the water—they’ve still got all the fiber. And their intensity will satisfy even the most insistent sweet tooth.
2 Comments