Who needs dessert? If you’re a serious wine lover like me, you’ll know what I mean. Dessert is that little bit of Cab left in your glass. Who needs more? We’re not dessert people (or so we tell ourselves); I’d rather slowly sip my glass of wine than start in on a chocolate brownie. And yet.

My freezer is always full of homemade fruit-enriched ice creams, and in the summer, I often bake tarts. That’s because we have an orchard. Preserving fruit, whether in salsas, chutneys, or desserts, is a labor of love and part of seasonal eating. Wine Country desserts are part of a whole eco-system of growing and using produce, and as such, they have rich historical precedent. (Don’t get my started on my favorites.)

I can’t imagine a world in which I’d say to myself, you know what? I think I’ll bake a chocolate cake. Not unless one of my backyard trees started sprouting chocolate bars and I suddenly had thirty pounds of chocolate that I needed to process and preserve. If I think of chocolate at all, it belongs in winter’s domain.

Wine Country baking reflects our palates as winemakers which are more at ease with sour and bitter flavors than the standard sugar-loving American palate. Over decades, we have trained our palates to be exquisitely sensitive, and therefore we enjoy nuanced and sophisticated flavors — the opposite of most sugary desserts. (A taste of something overly sweet actually “burns” my mouth.)

I do most of our baking from scratch, especially since Kristof developed an allergy to eggs. I find myself rewriting dessert recipes to make them less sweet. The time has come to recognize that we are dessert people — Wine Country dessert people. And that this knowledge is worth sharing because it’s part of the celebration of healthy, seasonal eating.

A slice of bakery birthday cake with hydrogenated vegetable shortening frosting makes me cringe (forever frosting is how I think of it, just one molecule away from plastic), but a fig leaf panna cotta with slices of fresh fig? Honeycomb and Humboldt Fog? Now you’re speaking my language.

Dessert wines—wines with some residual sugar—share a place in defining what a Wine Country dessert can be. Pairing a dessert wine, sometimes with something savory, opens new realms of flavor possibilities.

Desserts in the Wine Country home are simple, rustic, and easily repeatable. They are part of the meal as a whole. They have minimal sugar compared to other desserts and could be comprised of fruit by itself, or fruit baked in cream or doused with wine. A small bite of something sweet signals the end of the meal, and at a dinner party, prepares guests to gather themselves and go home.

Wine Country desserts are always homemade and are consciously made healthier, more nourishing, and nutrient dense whenever possible. Eating dessert in moderation is part of a healthy Wine Country diet that includes moderate wine drinking.

As always, I like to start a Blog, then flesh it out over time, adding to the conversation when I encounter something of interest. When recipes belong to someone else, I’ll share the source; when mine, I’ll share the recipe. Cheers!

Ice Cream

Ice cream is the mother’s milk of desserts for me. We start here because my children grew up eating Sally Fallon’s recipe for Vanilla Ice Cream from Nourishing Traditions. I don’t think she would mind me sharing it: 3 raw egg yolks from our backyard chickens, 1/2 cup maple syrup, 1 T. vanilla, 1 T. arrowroot, 3 cups (raw) heavy cream. I was aware, as a young mother, that I was going against the grain. It was always a lonely battle. An ice cream that delivers protein, enzymes, and more? Thanks for that.

There’s no avoiding the raw dairy issue, though. I would like dessert making to be free and fun — yet there’s no swerving away. It’s subversive. I’m deeply subversive, at any rate. We can’t talk about ice cream without talking about raw milk, and once you’ve opened that box, it’s open. The fact that I can actually buy raw milk in the state of (over-regulated/under-regulated) California is really surprising. One company that I know of, at least, (Raw Farm USA), has had to work really hard for that. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t care, except for this: it tastes SO MUCH FREAKING BETTER.

Consider raw milk as an analogy for many things in life. Because some cows are sick and live in unsanitary conditions, we pasteurize all milk. This denatures milk from healthy cows eating fast-growing green grass, destroying the enzymes and beneficial bacteria in the milk, a least common denominator approach.

Skip ahead 20 years. Farm-to-Table ice creams are a staple of Wine Country restaurant dessert menus; sometimes the ice cream is served in little craft containers like the ones I pack mine in. We’re on to something.

There’s a recipe I adore for its perfect simplicity from Pam Anderson’s book Perfect Recipes For Having People Over. (The book should be mandatory reading after the COVID shutdowns, when we forgot how to entertain.) All the recipes in this book are geared for those times when you are hosting 8-12 or more people. It’s a happy book. “Instant Strawberry Ice Cream” probably encapsulates the ideal of Wine Country dessert better than any other recipe. In fact, I made it the other night when I realized that I had vacuum sealed strawberries from Watmaugh Strawberry Stand in Sonoma.

If you stopped at Watmaugh this summer, you would have been told not to buy a whole flat of strawberries unless you could eat it that day. That’s how ripe they were. I love that honesty. True enough, the most delicious strawberries of your life started to disintegrate Day #2. So I froze them.

Pam Anderson suggests throwing those berries into a blender with 1 1/2 cup heavy cream and a bit of sugar, blending it, and enjoying instant ice cream. Yes. The freshness lives on in November.

But making fruit-enriched ice creams is not always this easy. Juicy, drippingly-juicy, fruits like our white peaches, plums, and pears, aren’t great candidates for the freeze and blend method. I’ve experimented with cooking them down to a jam-like consistency before chilling and mixing them with cream. Basically, that’s all you need to know. Play with the sugar density, cream, and acidity. A sprinkle of sea salt won’t harm. Chill it down. You’re preserving summer’s bounty. My ventures into this realm (and recipe cards) can be read in “Wine Country Home Cooking: Our Garden.”

Wine Country Home Cooking: Desserts