NY Times

This caught my eye. I am always looking for something new and delicious and with summer coming up, this is a good way to eat something sweet without ruining all the work you did to get into your bathing suit!






You might think it bizarre: celery sorbet with a little dressed celery salad; goat-cheese-mousse balls coated with olive-oil-sautéed bread crumbs; macerated figs with balsamic vinegar. And those things go together on a plate.
Related

Mark Bittman Blog: Cooking with Brooks Headley (May 6, 2011)
Enlarge This Image

Yunhee Kim for The New York Times
Readers' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Read All Comments (13) »
Maybe it is bizarre— but it’s also incredible. (And it’s doable at home, with or without concessions; I’ll get to that.)

It’s not entirely clear where this and the other often vegetable-based desserts by Brooks Headley — the pastry chef whom my colleague Sam Sifton called “brilliant” in his four-star review of Del Posto — come from. Certainly not an articulated philosophy: “I don’t think of myself as a pastry chef, exactly,” the 38-year-old Headley says.“I just make food that happens at the end of the meal.”

Headley was 27 years old and drumming in a punk band in 1999 when he took a job as an assistant at Galileo, a wildly popular Italian restaurant in Washington at the time. His background, however, had primed him for ascension. His family, originally from Calabria, was “completely obsessed with food,” as was his band. They traveled with a milk crate stocked with pantry items and decent cookware and stayed in people’s houses, often sleeping on the floor. “When gigs were over, we’d find a grocery store, buy whatever we could, go back to whoever’s house and cook,” he says.

Thus trained, slaving as an assistant pastry chef must have seemed like a vacation. “When I walked into that kitchen, I remember thinking, This is it,” he says. From Galileo, he eventually moved to Tosca and, later, Komi — and when, in 2008, two pastry chefs left Del Posto in New York, Headley talked his way into the job. “Many of my influences” — the co-owner Mario Batali and the executive chef Mark Ladner — “are people I now work for; it’s like they formed a supergroup and I got asked to join the band.”

But instead of producing, say, bacon ice cream with salted caramel-candied French fries (I made that up, but you watch: someone will claim I stole the idea), Headley is making mind-blowing fruit-and-vegetable-based desserts, like his fantastic version of a classic Neapolitan eggplant-and-chocolate dish. (When I ate this dish in Naples, it was grossly sweet; his version is like a dessert eggplant Parmesan prepared by a wizard.) He also does polenta with oven-roasted rhubarb and tangerine, as well as a wholly un-American carrot cake with a psychedelic carrot purée and sage gelato. When the good peaches are in season, he will concoct “something” with a whole, skin-intact peach roasted with olive oil, honey and basil. (He uses more olive oil in his desserts than some restaurants use in their pastas.)

The celery thing (I don’t know what to call it, really) is, I believe, the best representation of his style. I love the little vinaigrettey strands of celery on the sweet sorbet and the fantastic olive-oil crunch of the slightly sweet goat-cheese balls. (This from a person who doesn’t like goat cheese.) I’ve made only a couple of adaptations in these recipes to make them more accessible for those of us without professional equipment (or assistants). Headley uses a juicer for the celery juice in the sorbet, but if you don’t have one, the blender works, per my method. He melts goat brie for the cheese mixture, but it’s a laborious process, and fresh goat cheese makes things a whole lot easier. (I’ve posted the original method here; if you’re ambitious, go for it.) And if you don’t have an ice cream machine, make a granita instead of sorbet; there is a way in which, texturally, it’s even more successful.