Frozen Dessert

Why does coconut sorbet taste so rich, even without cream or eggs? Well, because there’s plenty of fat in the coconut milk itself. It’s one of the easiest sorbets in the world to make, thanks to the prevalence of decent canned coconut milk, but I like to give it a spark of heat, too. Eat this on its own, or with a cookie or other dessert of your choice. It goes especially well with chocolate. Remember that to make good ice cream with a machine that requires a prefrozen canister, you need to plan ahead and put the canister in the freezer at least 2 days before you’re going to make the ice cream. (I store mine there.)

Dairy and smoked salt go together like rainbows and lollipops. Only better. The rainbow’s beauty is nice, but one can only speculate at its flavor, and you outgrow lollipops. Homemade ice cream is another matter. Swapping the bright intensity of sugar for the dewy softness of honey lends gusto to the meteorological event happening in your mouth. The interplay of pungent salt amid the cream’s frozen opulence of sweet smoke and vanilla bolsters the soul with prismatic beauty all its own.

The tristar strawberry, pear sorbet, and goat froyo desserts are variations on a theme. Every pastry chef and department has a successful formula to piece flavors and textures together into desserts. This is ours: ganache + sorbet + textural element = plated dessert. These types of desserts highlight the way that Milk Bar components, which might seem kind of jokey (like Ritz crunch) or weird (like pumpkin ganache), can be brought together in unexpected ways as thoughtful, delicious, grown-up desserts. The composition of these dishes can be looked at as guides for ways to put together fancy-looking plates at home. If you are baking out of this book a bunch—making liquid cheesecake or crunches or cakes and ending up with leftovers—you will see that plates like these are actually quite easy to assemble just from your scraps. Think of these recipes as your Milk Bar final exam for all things sweet yet savory. Bonus points if you use chilled plates to serve the desserts.

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.

At our East Village Milk Bar, we have two big-boy soft-serve machines that churn ice cream day and night. To keep ourselves entertained and to keep customers interested, we change the flavors every six weeks, basing each flight of flavors around a theme. This recipe was part of a suite of ice creams flavored liked baked goods, and, true to its name, it tastes just like cheesecake. The twist with it and our key lime pie ice cream was crazy good!

We use cake scraps in our kitchen for just about anything. Really. Even ice creams, where they add body, texture, and depth of flavor. We put chocolate cake scraps in the red velvet ice cream because we want it to taste like red velvet cake. We also like to take it too far and swirl red velvet ice cream with cream cheese frosting ice cream.

This was one of the first spring desserts we made for Ko. It is simple but somehow hits home in just the right way.

One summer we had the idea of putting a frozen ice cream pie on the menu at Ssäm Bar. It would be sliced and stored in the freezer, so all the cooks had to do was get it on a plate, put some fruit on top of it, and—booya!—send it out to the table. Not a lot of work for the already-slammed savory cook. But that was during the time when we were operating out of a portion of the tiny, tiny basement at Ko, and there wasn’t any extra real estate for a professional ice cream machine. So we took a little time to think about how we could cheat the process a little—basically, we needed to get rid of the churning while freezing. We ended up finding that our sweet corn cereal milk was the milk that took to the task the best—the freeze-dried corn and Cap’n Crunch combo has this intense corn pudding flavor. It’s so tasty it can be diluted with a lot of fatty, bland cream and still pack a punch of corn flavor. The high proportion of cream, fortified with the starch from the cereal and corn, creates an “ice cream” that freezes soft but hard, a texture kind of like Häagen-Dazs. Because it gets loose and pourable as it defrosts, the “ice cream” is best for molded frozen uses, like this ice cream pie, or poured into, say, Popsicle molds to make ice cream pops. Once we had this crazy intense corn ice cream, we set to making a crust corny enough to match it. That process led us down the road to developing our corn cookie, which is the sleeper of all the Milk Bar cookies. It looks so harmless, so plain, so yellow, so un-cookie-like. It’s also my grandma’s favorite. Her house is surrounded by cornfields, so she’s my authority.

Cereal milk is made. Panna cotta, conquered. Easy, right? On to ice cream. Scoop the ice cream into your favorite pie crust (see page 59 for our Cereal Milk Ice Cream Pie), sandwich it between your favorite cookies (mine is the Cornflake Chocolate-Chip-Marshmallow Cookie, page 55), or scoop it into a bowl and decorate with your favorite breakfast cereal and jam or jelly.

Like the original, fruity cereal milk ice cream can be used to fill any of the pie crusts in this book or in a milkshake (fruity cereal milk blended with fruity cereal milk ice cream will change your life). We like it best straight out of the freezer, or scattered with Fruity Pebble Crunch (page 52) on top.