Yotam Ottolenghi is the British-based Israeli restaurateur known for his works like Jerusalem: A Cookbook, a tome that every liberal Jewish resident of Brooklyn is required by law to own. Now, he’s back with Sweet, a deceptively simply-titled book given that completing any of the recipes feels you’re in Snape’s potion class and if you add the porcupine quills while the cauldron is still on fire you’ll break out into painful boils and ruin everything, and your cheesecake will taste terrible.

Ottolenghi’s partner in this endeavor is pastry chef Helen Goh, who is clearly some sort of evil baking genius, taking Ottolenghi’s overly ambitious recipes and adding enough sugar to turn a first-grade classroom into a Lord of the Flies-esque dystopia.

I like baking but am by no means an artist. I can kill it with a simple banana bread, but I’m not one to start piping frosting or melting sauces in a bowl suspended over a different bowl. But I had a copy of Sweet, and so help me, I was going to give it a try, embarking on a journey of late-night meringues, too-much layering, and cutting fresh figs into slices. Figs are very squishy. They don’t slice easily.

First, I decided to start with a cake. My choice was the book’s apple and olive oil cake with maple frosting. The recipe called for vanilla seeds straight from the bean, which I had never purchased in my life. It’s hella expensive, but I figured I couldn’t deviate on the very first recipe, so I dutifully complied. When I tasted the cake batter, I immediately, if grudgingly, noticed the difference from extract.

This recipe included slicing the cake into two layers, putting frosting on the bottom layer, and putting the other half back on top before finishing frosting. But I did it. And people loved it. First recipe, success.

Next, I made pecan snowballs, also known as a Mexican Wedding Cake, which are round cookies made up of mostly sugar, ground nuts, and butter (so. much. butter). They were more difficult than your average dessert, but after the first recipe they were, well, a piece of cake. They were also the closest recipe I tried to something normal— indulgent, easy to grab more than one, and not full of odd flavor combinations or overly unusual construction. Plus, I was able to use some of that pesky leftover vanilla bean.

Finally, after two Sweet recipes under my belt, I was ready. The recipe from the cover of the book is a cinnamon pavlova with praline cream topped with figs and honeyed nuts. I had never had a pavlova, let alone made one, but Yotam and Helen had called upon me, and it was my sacred duty to answer.

Was I instructed to make the base of the pavlova, a cake-sized meringue, by pouring batter onto a circle you have pencilled onto a piece of parchment paper and attempt to sculpt it into a nest? You betcha. Did I have to make the praline cream from scratch? Yeah, what do you think this is, Easy-Bake Oven?

It literally took me days to make this thing. Night one was making the meringue, which took hours to bake and hours to set. Then came melting the chocolate, brushing it on the meringue, candying the almonds and grinding them to make the praline, combining that with mascarpone and heavy cream, slicing figs, and garnishing the whole thing with honey and more almonds when it was done. It didn’t look like the cover of the book when it was done, but it didn’t look like a Pinterest Fail either. I was a bit naughty by assembling it a few hours before serving, despite the book’s protestations, but finally, I was able to serve it.

Behold:

Was it worth it? My guests thought the pavlova was great, and I briefly developed the power to enter people’s dreams as reward for pleasing my baking masters. So yeah, all in all a success.

Effort justification is the idea that if you put a lot of energy into accomplishing something, you’ll convince yourself that the reward was great, like people who insist they loved Infinite Jest. And so I really, really needed these desserts to be brilliant, thinking of when I dropped the vial of vanilla beans and got glass all over my floor, or was up at 1 in the morning waiting for the meringue to finish baking so I could turn off the oven and go to sleep. And the desserts were brilliant, but I wish Sweet included a chapter on emotional support for the whole process.

To make a dessert from this book is to become emotionally invested in a food you prepare in a way that might seem unhealthy. If someone says no thank you when you offer them a portion, remind yourself that it doesn’t make them simple fools with no eye for art who are letting a gift from Ottolenghi and Goh (for which you are the divine conduit) slip through their unworthy fingers. It’s probably not personal.

Plus, expect these desserts to stretch much further than they appear. They’re so rich and complex that they have an amazing ability to make even the lustiest dessert-fiend have a portion or two and decline to keep going. It’s not like making brownies that you shovel into your mouth one after the other to maximize the chocolatiness. There’s subtlety and intensity that we’re not used to as a culture where we can buy Entenmann’s around the corner (not to diss my doughnut fave).

I didn’t make any of the explicitly Jewish or Israeli recipes in the book, though there are plenty, from rugelach, to tahini and halva brownies, to sufganiyot (just in time for Chanukah!). But I’m also far from done with this cookbook that I probably shouldn’t have let into my home, with its corrupting, sugary influence. I’m currently using pantry foods to save the tin cans for a sweet bread recipe in the book which you bake straight into a can.

In short, you can get the book for a loved one as a Chanukah present, but be aware that it’s a somewhat sadistic act. You can get it for yourself, but know that once you have it, you can’t do it halfway. And it may be a lonely road to get others to recognize what you’ve experienced. Surely when Moses saw the back of God he felt alienated from his fellow men. But that is the price to pay to know that you’ve transcended normal dessert, perhaps forever.

Photos by Gabriela Geselowitz

The post I Pity You Mortals Who Do Not Own ‘Sweet’ appeared first on Jewcy.

Have you ever heard complaints about Ashkenazi cuisine? Not quibbles with individual dishes, mind you, but declarations that the entirety of the ethnicity’s food culture is simply Not Good? And have these assertions ever come from other Ashkenazi Jews?

Jeffrey Yoskowitz and Liz Alpern sure had heard it all. But for a few years now, they’ve been making old recipes new through their business, Gefilteria. They’ve tackled everything from kvass to the black and white cookie, but as the name suggests, they’ve especially burdened themselves with the challenge of reclaiming that divisive Jewish offering: gefilte fish.

And now, in time for the High Holy Days, they have released a book: The Gefilte Manifesto: New Recipes for Old World Jewish Foods. As the subtitle suggests, it is by and large a cookbook, but also a series of personal reflections on the food, a history of Ashkenazi cuisine, and tips on how to modernize dishes based on current food culture and technology. They largely don’t make changes for the sake of shaking things up, but there are definitively creations like the kimchi-stuffed cabbage that shtetl-dwellers couldn’t have enjoyed.

Most of all, Yoskowitz and Alpern have something to prove. Through vivid discussions of spices and flavors, and gorgeous photographs of dishes, they’re gently, but firmly insisting that the problem isn’t the cuisine— it’s the way you’ve encountered it, as a watered-down, mass-manufactured facsimile of what your ancestors enjoyed on far more limited means.

In an era of a new, thoughtful approach to food (and in a place like Brooklyn, where the Gefilteria is based,) Yoskowitz and Alpern also touch on concerns of sustainability and seasonability that are both popular now, and were essential in the Old World. Take the new recipe for challah with a marble rye twist— Alpern suggests using slightly stale challah to make french toast, a newer way to solve an old problem. In fact, the book has an entire troubleshooting guide in the back of suggestions of what to do with extra ingredients: “If this book is good for anything,” it says, “it’s for what to do with your leftover pickle brine.”

Ultimately, the book’s message is simple: continue to enjoy the food that sustained European Jews for so long.

“Gefilte is not just about your bubbe,” Yoskowitz, Alpern, and their co-founder Jackie Lilinshtein write in the titular manifesto, “Gefilte is about reclaiming our time-honored foods and caring how they taste and how they’re sourced… It is about taking food traditions seriously and reclaiming the glory of Ashkenazi food— what it has been and what it can be.”

The book also contains over 100 recipes, from mains to drinks, so if you don’t like something (or have dietary restrictions, like vegetarianism), there’s bound to be something you can enjoy. In my (pescetarian) household, my husband prepared both the book’s kale salad (“really delicious,” quoth he,) and sauerkraut (“good, and easy to follow”).

While we have yet to tackle the book’s instructions on how to make gefilte, I’ve had the Gefilteria’s product, and it is some good stuff. If I could recreate that in my own home, I’d be well on my way to converting nonbelievers to the joys of gefilte fish, and Ashkenazi cuisine.

Images courtesy of The Gefilte Manifesto

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