Boyle - Flavorful : 150 irresistible desserts in all-time favorite flavors

Copyright 2015 by Tish Boyle

Interior photography 2015 by Andrew Meade

Food styling by Claire Perez

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boyle, Tish.

Flavorful : 150 irresistible desserts in all-time favorite flavors / Tish Boyle; photography by Andrew Meade.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-118-52355-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-544-18640-8 (ebook)

1. Desserts. I. Title.

TX773.B6928 2015

641.86 dc23 2015004678

v1.0915

Theres no accounting for taste, as the saying goes, and this is certainly true when it comes to desserts. Consider three people dining together at a restaurant. What makes one person order the lemon souffl, another the flourless chocolate cake, and the third the espresso-soaked tiramisu? Why do some people love the puckery tartness of a lemon meringue pie, while others swoon over a rich chocolate layer cake or a caramel mousse? If theres a chocolate item on a dessert menu, for example, thats the one Ill order every time. Everyones palate is a little different.

Ive always been curious about flavor. In my years as editor of Chocolatier and Pastry Art & Design magazines, I frequently asked pastry chefs how they planned their dessert menus. Many cited seasonality as an important factor in selecting items for their menus desserts with apples or pears for the fall; citrus for winter; strawberry and rhubarb for the spring; and stone fruits and berries in the summer. Working with the seasons makes perfect sense, because a big part of a pastry chefs job is getting ahold of the very best raw ingredients throughout the year. After all, if you start with oversized, flavorless strawberries, your strawberry shortcake will never be any good, regardless of how pretty it looks on the plate.

But even more critical than working with the seasons is the pastry chefs underlying goal of selling as many desserts as possible. As one chef put it, You can make the best prune tart in the world, but if people dont like prunes, its just not going to sell. A good pastry chef knows what flavors sell, and his or her menu will focus on these flavors. These are the desserts that people will order time after time, regardless of the season or, for that matter, anything else.

Many factors come into play when we taste a dessert. Our tongues can identify four tastes: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Simply put, it is how we react to the combination of these four tastes that dictates our flavor preferences. My personal research, based on interviewing countless pastry chefs, led me to a list of the nine hottest flavors in the dessert world: vanilla, chocolate, caramel, coffee, nuts, apple, berries and cherries, sweet cheese (as in cheesecake), and citrus fruit. My objective in this book is to present a collection of exceptional desserts in these Americas favorite flavors. No matter which is your favorite, there is something for everyone here, from caramel devotees to chocolate fanatics to cheesecake aficionados to coffee junkies to lemon lovers. Capturing flavor is the first, and probably most important, step in creating a great dessert. Adding textural contrasts and presenting that dessert in a visually appealing way also contribute to its success. Each recipe in this book has been developed with the goal of maximizing flavor and visual appeal an excellent foundation for developing a repertoire of memorable desserts that you can depend on and return to time after time.