Fruit

Nut crunch makes a great pie crust! I absolutely love this pie, but it doesn’t fit into the composed dessert realm of Ssäm Bar’s menu and it isn’t quick and easy to pack like Milk Bar pies need to be, so it never made it onto a menu. It’s a delicious recipe you’ll only find here.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to make a good banana cake. I’m talking about a sheet cake that tastes like banana bread, but not too dry, not too tough, and not dense and fudgy, like the dead center of banana bread can be at times. For weeks, maybe even a month, we worked on a banana cake in the basement of Ko. It felt like a lifetime—and still we weren’t getting anywhere close. That is, until Emily, our extern, came in with her mother’s sacred banana cake recipe. We adapted it, but this recipe belongs to the heart of her family. Mrs. Kritemeyer, we love you!

Like the candy bar pie, this banana cake is a doozy to make, but it’s here because it’s a bestseller at Milk Bar—so much so, that in two years, it is the only cake that has never been rotated out, based on season or popularity. It is Oprah’s favorite cake, and it will be yours too.

In the fall of 2008, Ssäm Bar needed a seasonal dessert, and Concord grapes were on the brain. Best man I know suggested I do a take on a pb & j, but my way, using techniques and perhaps a flavor that made sense but was unexpected. I chose the path of a panna cotta, made with milk steeped with the flavor of a saltine cracker: salty and soda-y—a poor man’s pb & j. People were going to love it or hate it. And that was perfectly fine with me, because I loved it, though the saltine milk is not for wussies.

Fresh guava always tastes a little funny to me, but I love guava nectar, which is why we chose to use it here in place of making our own puree from scratch. Guava nectar is easily found in the Goya aisle of nearly any grocery store. .

When I moved to NYC to attend cooking school, I dove right in. I got several part-time jobs in a variety of locales. Basically, I worked for anyone who would hire me. Early morning. Late night. Magnolia Bakery didn’t bite, but there was a bakery (now closed) in the West Village off Jane Street, run by a fiery Cuban woman who agreed to put me on the schedule. After a late night of work as a hostess, I would drag myself in early the next morning to this strange bakery, almost the only motivation being a pastelito, a Cuban puff pastry topped with cane sugar and filled with guava paste and cream cheese. It was the most delicious and different pastry I had ever tasted, and I knew I’d want to use the flavor combo one day. One time, when we were changing the menu at Ko and I was on a breakfast-inspired kick (guava and cream cheese is a classic breakfast pairing in many Spanish-speaking cultures), an idea took hold. I knew guava would bring the perfect acidity to a pre-dessert, and combining it with liquid cheesecake, which always makes me happy, was a no-brainer.

When we opened Ko, we did so with a deep-fried apple pie. It resonated so much with people that we decided to use the apple pie as inspiration for a cake. We already had the crumb-into-ganache-into-frosting down and we loved the pie crumb we had developed for a few Noodle Bar and Ko desserts seasons before. This cake will make you seem like a genius, though all you are doing is layering apple pie fixins between layers of slightly nutty (with brown butter) cake. Leftovers make especially delicious impromptu cake truffles (see page 122).

This recipe is similar to the grapefruit pie’s Grapefruit Passion Curd (page 68), but with slightly different ingredient proportions. It also makes a larger batch so there’s enough to fill the chocolate chip cake.

Passion fruit, chocolate, and coffee is one of my favorite flavor trios. Though the combo sounds a little out there, it’s actually beloved in lots of pastry kitchens. I wanted a way to feature it in a mainstream dessert. Turns out a deep vanilla chocolate chip layer cake is the perfect fit.

You have to plan ahead for this one. Buy bananas that are ripe and then let them get nearly black/brown before accepting them as the rrrrrripe bananas needed for this recipe. Another great option: at the bakery, we peel just ripe bananas, freeze them, and let them finish developing flavor in the freezer for 2 days or up to 2 weeks. Said rrrrrripe bananas are the difference between having your banana pie tasting like banana Laffy Taffy and the most delicious, deep banana cream pie ever.

This cake was a bestseller at Milk Bar right off the bat. If you’ve had it, chances are you were hooked at first bite. Though the recipe calls for a few things that you’ll have to source aside from your normal pantry ingredients, remember that amazon.com can be the love of your life too, and that this cake is well worth the effort.

After the milk crumb phenomenon in the kitchen, we had to find a mainstream use for it, rather than just hiding it under some ice cream. It needed its moment in the sun. So I brainstormed. A peaches-and-cream cookie was my original thought. Momofuku does mean “lucky peach” in Japanese, after all. But I decided we needed something that would hit home even more for guests. Did you know dried blueberries existed? I didn’t, until I surveyed Whole Foods’ dried fruit selection for a dried peach alternative. The clouds parted, and it was clear. We needed a blueberry-and-cream cookie, reminiscent of a blueberry muffin top (the best part of the muffin).

Freeze-dried fruit! The range of delicious freeze-dried fruits and veggies can make your world of crumb possibilities seem endless. We grind down freeze-dried fruits and veggies into a powder in a blender or food processor and then toss them with milk crumbs to give pops of new flavor to an old crumb. We adjust the moisture with butter or white chocolate if necessary, based on the ingredients in the mix and our end goal.

Passion fruit puree can be found in Latin grocery stores and online at amazon.com.

The acid from the grapefruit juice and citric acid will naturally thicken the sweetened condensed milk, which is one of the coolest things to watch happen right before your very eyes.