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 ecosystem of growing and using produce, and as such, they have rich historical precedent.

I almost never say to myself, you know what? I think I’ll bake a chocolate cake. Baking is a matter of exigency, and unless one of my backyard trees starts sprouting chocolate bars, and I suddenly have thirty pounds of chocolate that I need to process and preserve, I don’t think that will change. When I think about chocolate, it’s usually 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 lonely. An ice cream that delivers protein, enzymes, and more? Thanks for that.

Dessert making should be frivolous and fun — yet there’s no swerving away from the raw dairy issue for me when it comes to making ice cream; Amish farmers have been targeted and legally harassed the last few years for their raw dairy. Raw dairy is subversive. I’m deeply subversive, at any rate. 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 might not care about the politics of raw milk, except for this: it tastes SO MUCH FREAKING BETTER. The fact that raw dairy delivers vital nutrients that are lost in pasteurization is a bonus.

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.

Raw or not, 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 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, worth its weight in gold (and I have the hardbound edition). “Instant Strawberry Ice Cream” exemplifies the ideal of Wine Country desserts. In fact, I made it the other night when I realized that I still had vacuum-sealed strawberries from the 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 start to disintegrate Day #2. So I froze them.

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

But making fruit-enriched ice creams is not always that easy. Juicy, drippingly-juicy, fruits like our peaches, plums, and pears, aren’t always great candidates for the freeze and blend method if you want robust flavor. 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.”

CREAMY DESSERTS

When I was a child, I looked forward to invitations to dinner at the homes of family friends because I knew moms went all out when it came to dessert for guests. Those were the days of mud pies, grasshopper pies, and sheet cakes. Pre-made graham cracker crusts and mountains of Cool Whip. Child or adult, it didn’t matter; as a guest you were assured a hefty slab of some concoction from the glossy women’s magazines.

My ideal has changed as an adult; the perfect dessert embodies purity, simplicity, and clarity of flavors. I love the “blank canvas” of simple creamy desserts like puddings, custards, crème caramels, crème brûlées, and panna cottas for showcasing seasonal fruits. These are comforting desserts, nursery puddings. Sometimes we feed them to people on the mend to help them heal and gain strength because they are easily digestible and protein-packed. I’m not alone in admiring this genre of dessert; The New Best Recipe describes panna cotta as “a virginal dessert, a jellied alabaster cream. It forms a richly neutral backdrop for everything it touches…”

Crème brûlée epitomizes Wine Country fine dining dessert to me, perhaps because it was popular in restaurants in the 1990’s and therefore made a real impression on me on those special occasions when we dined out. In the early 1990’s, downtown Napa was comparatively undeveloped, and you drove Up Valley if you wanted a fancy dinner. Brix restaurant in Yountville had an Asian-fusion moment (which I loved), and I remember a trio of (somewhat precious) crème brûlées served in porcelain Asian soup spoons—ginger, matcha tea, and chocolate—as if engraved in my memory. (I couldn’t decide if you picked up each spoon and ate the dessert directly or used a small spoon to scoop the custard out of the larger spoon. You see what I mean?)

What I loved then (and still love) about the dessert was the satisfying thwack you make with your spoon on the crisp sugar crust and the textural contrast between the crust and the ethereal cream below, which was likely dotted with real vanilla specks. As a new wife, one of my first kitchen investments was a butane torch for making my own; I really thought I’d arrived.

No, it doesn’t grow in my backyard, but how could I not include chocolate in the creamy dessert category? The ganache (to the left) is one of my favorite finds, a mix of pureed avocado, honey, and cocoa powder (shown here with crystalized ginger). Delicious. The sabayon, one of my all time standbys and a classic of French cuisine, requires 12 raw egg whites from my flock of backyard chickens. And humble rice pudding (a Swedish Christmas staple), when elevated with warm spices like cardamom, sprinkled with crushed pistachios, and served with a glass of Sauternes, is a quintessential Napa Valley winter dessert.

FRUIT

Fresh fruit, seasonal fruit, is really the perfect dessert on its own and needs no embellishment. The only reason to put it into a pie, galette, tart, hand-pie, or crumble, as far as I’m concerned, is when it’s blemished (the birds pecked it) or not perfectly ripe. A fruit salad, lightly dressed with mint and a squeeze of lime, ends a meal satisfyingly and also aids in digestion when the raw fruit (like papaya, pineapple, and mango) is full of enzymes. Summer dinner parties, here in the Napa Valley, are a wonderful opportunity to play with fresh fruit, like lightly grilled peaches, and dress it up slightly with sweetened mascarpone or cannoli cream.

In French Provincial Cooking, published in 1960, Elizabeth David snapshots the care and skill that went into simple French household cooking of the time, recettes de bonne femme. She writes, “at routine French family meals, fresh fruit after the cheese mostly takes the place of a sweet course but, for more ceremonial occasions, a fruit tart, a souffle or a cream of some sort usually appears.” Her recipes for very simple fruit desserts are an ongoing revelation to me, as I flip through the pages and imagine such luscious yet simple and nourishing sweets: baked apricots, pineapple with kirsch, melon stuffed with wild strawberries, peaches in white wine, apples cooked in butter, pears cooked with cream.

My mother’s recipe — pitted Medjool dates stuffed with cream cheese and toasted pecans — makes a simple yet satisfying winter dessert.

Another book that inspires me to think seasonally about fruit desserts is Perla Meyers’ The Seasonal Kitchen: A Return to Fresh Foods, first published in the 1970’s, which (bewilderingly!) appears to be out of print. My beloved copy is battered and falling to pieces; it first belonged to Kristof in high school when he was considering a culinary career. I adore the slightly recherche, old-fashioned-in-the-best-way recipes, divided according to season. I’ve made Strawberries in Liqueur in the spring, Plums in White Wine in the summer, Pears al Vino in the fall, and Oranges Sevillane in the winter. You know something? I can’t think of the last time I ordered dessert in a fine dining restaurant. I don’t do it. The last thing I want after dining well is something heavy like a butterscotch bread pudding, you know? But a tiny dish of Oranges Sevillane? So chic, I couldn’t resist, and I think restaurants should just automatically bring something like that to the table.

DESSERT WINE

In writing about fruit desserts, it doesn’t escape me that so many dishes are spiked or splashed with liquors or wine. A well-stocked pantry, at least in the French tradition of the bonne table, used to include a variety of alcoholic beverages that impart flavor to sauces in small amounts, such as Calvados. A brandy made from apples and pears makes perfect sense to me, as a way of preserving nature’s bounty.

Of course it’s not necessary to macerate your plums in white wine to enjoy a good fruit dessert, but people who believe that no amount of alcohol is safe are missing out on a lot, including my point: these wine-splashed, organic, minimally sweetened, Wine Country farm-to-table desserts are comparatively healthy. I run into the true believer types on social media, much has I try to avoid them. I imagine their eyes roll back into their heads like zombies as they type no amount of alcohol is safe, no amount of alcohol is safe. It doesn’t help when I point out that nothing in life is safe. One could just as easily say, no amount of sugar is safe. No amount of tap water is safe. No amount of hydrogenated vegetable oil is safe.

I suppose the reason I’ve opened up my life and kitchen, as an otherwise private person, is that ours has been a good and healthy life in harmony with nature, one worth defending, especially as it is now under attack by forces that probably just want to buy vineyard cheap and replace vines with solar farms. In fact, I don’t see anyone defending—or even sharing—my main point: the foods that taste the very best are good for you, and wine in moderation is part of that. Reason to rejoice! I’m 55, in vibrant health, with no chronic diseases, no prescription pharmaceuticals. My dentist seems impressed that I’ve only ever had one cavity in my lifetime. And I’m the winemaker’s wife.

I’m not always a fan of what I see when I take a walk on a Saturday night in downtown Napa, which is reminding me more and more of Pleasure Island. The big chain hotels don’t feature small, organic wine labels; they push cocktails, because there’s a larger margin with hard alcohol. I cringe when I see the signs for whiskey bars: Wined out? Have a whiskey. Drunk people weave down the sidewalks; empty beer bottles litter plant pots. Being drunk is gross. The opposite of being drunk is not being sober—it’s drinking moderately. (For those of us who can.)

Dessert wines are an important feature of Wine Country Home Cooking and Desserts, one I am only just beginning to play with. Earlier this summer, our friend Gretchen came for lunch and to walk around the garden. She thoughtfully brought homemade “cocktail cookies,” savory Parmesan Galettes and Apricot & Tarragon Sables, from Dorrie Greenspan’s epic book on cookies. The idea of savory cookies was new to me! Recently, I made the Parmesan Galettes, delicious cookies that have only three ingredients: flour, butter, and Parmesan. The trouble was, I couldn’t find a pairing that hit. Cabernet? Not really. Until I flipped things around; they didn’t have to be cocktail cookies, they could be savory dessert cookies. I paired them with sweet, Malvasia Madeira, a fortified wine, and a side of fresh figs. The nuanced savory, nutty, and sweet flavors from the combination of fruit, cheese, and wine were outstanding, and I love the unexpected pairing of a baked good with no sugar and a sweet wine. For a special dinner, I might serve the galettes with demi sec Champagne.

PASTRY

But first, flour…

Pastry making is a natural accompaniment to the harvesting of seasonal fruits, plus, it’s an easy method of transforming imperfect produce, including the bruised, the slightly under- or overripe, and the bird-pecked into something wonderful. I also like nut, jam, and cream tarts. In my Wine Country home kitchen, all those galettes, pies, crostadas, crumbles, tarts, cobblers, and more are rustic, delicious, and sometimes downright ugly. That’s OK, because they don’t stick around long, and I’m not trying to win a ribbon.

I’m patting myself on the back for at least avoiding the harm done by glyphosate-laden, enriched, preservative-packed, store-bought baked goods that are almost guaranteed to be made with oxidizing, inflammatory, seed oils. My wholesome, ugly, tasty homemade pastries are an exercise in compromise, since I know they’re still sugary, carb-packed bombs. But I always use healthy, ancestral fats like butter, olive oil, and lard; I reduce the amount of sugar called for in many recipes and experiment with unrefined sugars; and I use organic and non-hybridized flours. Eaten in moderation, I call them part of the joys of a delicious and life-giving table.

Still, pastry exemplifies the unmixing camps of the gourmet foodies, the health foodies, and the homesteaders with their beloved sourdough starters. I don’t always understand why the Venn diagram doesn’t overlap more. To me, Julia Child’s desserts are reasonably healthy foods that healthy people can moderately indulge in. They have an aura of pleasure and delight about them. Cook and eat like Julia Child, and maybe you’ll live to be healthy into your 90’s, too. Health food desserts, even surprisingly tasty ones with names like “carob whip,” have the whiff of the second rate and the proselytizer about them.

Over the years, I’ve drifted away from The Weston A. Price Foundation—despite my unending gratitude for the key health and nutrition information I gleaned from them when my children were young—over issues like flour; they insist that it’s best to grind one’s own whole grain flour and to consume it within three days for optimal nutrition. But first, one should soak, sprout, and dehydrate wheat berries to remove phytic acid that blocks the absorption of minerals. I can’t imagine a universe in which I have that kind of time, though I do have a flour mill, and I’m glad to know how to use it.

My next best is to make a point of buying flour from organic and non-hybridized wheat grown in areas where it will not be cross-contaminated. This healthier flour also happens to taste and perform better; professional bakers love it. I’m a big fan of flour from Central Milling in Utah. Flour matters.

WINEMAKERS DON’T EAT CAKE

I was going to write that winemakers don’t eat cake. Then I checked my photos. Apparently, we do. Our daughter Pella, a talented linguist, practices her love of Slavic languages and desserts any time she’s home. She bakes layered Beehive cakes, Easter Kulich, New Year’s Vasilopita. Our daughter Sanna worked her way through the bright yellow Baking Illustrated one summer and made amazing apple fritters that would be at home at any Napa Valley restaurant brunch, though if you ask her now, she’ll say she has bigger fish to fry. Meaning she’s majoring in neuroscience and figuring out how to compress an MD and PhD into the fewest years possible.

My idea of the Wine Country cake is a simple, rustic, seasonal snack cake that doesn’t need frosting, like a gâteau au yaourt (yogurt cake) that you can mix by hand in one bowl. I love my recipe for cheerful Whole Orange Cake from an old issue of Sunset Magazine. I think of it as a quintessential California snack cake because you use two whole oranges, leaving the peel and pith intact. It is moist and marmalade-like, and you could substitute other interesting citrus you might have growing in your backyard like kumquats or those pink variegated lemons that are so sweet, you can bite right into a slice.

Once I adapted lemon ricotta cupcakes with ricotta/mascarpone frosting from Julia Turshen’s wonderful book, “Simply Julia: 110 Easy Recipes for Healthy Comfort Food.” Her baking is especially nice because it’s not too sweet, geared more for an adult palate, though kids would love it, too, and her cupcakes combine a subtle lemon flavor with protein from the ricotta and a deeply satisfying, creamy frosting that’s more dairy than sugar.

The ultimate Wine Country cake has to be the olive oil cake, especially since our Napa Valley landscape is dotted with olive trees, and so many wineries make their own extra virgin olive oil now. Olive oil cake used to be the specialty at Valley in Sonoma, where you could order a whole cake for special occasions. Glistening gold and (if you’re lucky) green from a quality, spicy, bitter olive oil, olive oil cake achieves its brilliance from a tension of opposites — it’s tender and light yet dense with precious oil; it takes its flavor from oil yet isn’t oily.

Chocolate Olive Oil Cake

I like this recipe from Central Milling, which is simple and elegant and results in a cake with a moist texture yet springy crumb. It reminds me, in terms of moistness, of the “mayonnaise” chocolate cakes moms would make in the 1970’s. I’ve omitted the glaze, which would make it too rich and sweet for my taste. The cake would be nice with a scoop of creme fraiche ice cream, and I might experiment with making it less sweet and more chocolatey, though Kristof says it’s perfect. I used “cocoa rouge,” a Dutch process cocoa with a pretty red hue.

CHEESE

Back in 2001, Kristof and I were traveling in France and stopped in Beaune, in the Burgundy wine region of France, to visit a cooperage called Tonnellerie Rousseau. We met our host, Manoel, at a bistro near the cooperage, and though we’d already eaten, we felt obliged to tuck into an outstanding meal of poached eggs in red wine sauce, beef cheeks, Pinot Noir, then coffee served with tiny plums in framboise. Manoel mentioned that he’d made us a dinner reservation that night at 8 pm at a Michelin-starred restaurant called Bernard Morillon. Could we ever eat again?

Manoel kept us at a frenetic pace until after 7 pm, touring the facility where logs were delivered, split, and planed into boards, then seasoned outdoors, learning how oak tanks are crafted, meeting with the owner of the cooperage, and giving detailed tasting notes on Pinot Noir lots from scores of different barrels. We quickly changed our clothes and ran to our dinner. Madame, with her winged eyeliner, greeted us. We ate foie gras with apples and pastry, lobster in cream sauce, pigeon, oysters in cream sauce, and veal liver. And then the cheese cart arrived! I wasn’t sure how the cheese situation was handled, plus we had a language barrier. I was stuffed. The waiter would point at a cheese, I would nod my head, and he would cut some and put it on my plate. I think he became embarrassed for me at a certain point, as the pile grew, had mercy on me, and quietly withdrew. This was followed by caramel souffle. It was midnight when we finally lelt, exhausted from a day and night of sensory indulgence.

I’ve never forgotten that mountain of cheeses. To me, one of the most satisfying desserts possible is cheese. I like to make a terrine of goat cheese and green grapes that’s nice as a starter but better as dessert. My mother makes a savory lavender cheese, iced with mascarpone like a cake and decorated with edible flowers and herbs. With fruit or candied pecans, it’s a satisfying dessert, as is goat cheese mixed with a little balsamic vinegar and shaped in a mold, then covered in honey. Honeycomb and Humboldt Fog? Wonderful.

Kristof once made grape must for replenishing Robert and Margrit Mondavi’s barrels of aceto balsamico using a noble family’s ancient recipe, which called for simmering the grape must, along with quince apples, for roughly 72 hours over an open flame. The quince apples became as sweet and tender as membrillo paste, and we ate them with Manchego cheese. I like caramelized pears with fresh farmer’s cheese. Fresh figs with honey and Gorgonzola. Sliced pears with crumbled blue cheese and pecans, which is actually a salad, and was delicious the other night when we had it with a glass of spicy, gingery sparkling wine from Virginia. Would winemakers eat salad for dessert? You bet we would. We’re a different sort.

ON CRAVING SUGAR

Healthy, well-nourished people tend not to crave sugar; that is, we can enjoy a bit of something sweet, but we don’t crave it in the way that the body of someone who is ill, a chronic dieter, or who has a nutrient deficiency or gut dysbiosis does. In a cruel paradox of nature, if you ask someone who is malnourished what foods they are craving, they are NOT likely to say, I wish I could have a bowl of bone broth with tender, simmered vegetables and minced organ meats; spinach cooked in cream; roasted beets tossed with olive oil, lemon, toasted hazelnuts, and blue cheese; beef tartare; a few deviled eggs with caviar; homemade pickles; a wedge of raw cheddar; and a glass of whole milk. In other words, they’re NOT going to crave the foods that would nourish them into good health. They’re likely going to crave something sweet.

On the other hand, ask someone who is healthy and well-nourished what they’re craving, and they’re likely to say something weird: a dish of plain yogurt, a glistening slice of head cheese, broccolini with almonds. You could take this person to Bouchon Bakery and ask them to choose a treat, and they might say, “Actually, I’m not hungry.”

I’ve observed this dynamic in our extended family. Men of a certain age are prescribed statins for no good reason; suddenly, they keep losing their car keys. Men who never liked sweets keep jars of hard candy on their desk and snack on mini chocolate bars with a furtive gleam in their eyes. The brain is composed of cholesterol, so lowering the amount in the blood will only cause cognitive problems, as well as cravings. The body is trying hard to signal that something is out of whack, but instead of craving duck fat, the body craves sugar. The next thing you know, someone who was perfectly healthy and actually had a good cholesterol ratio is pre-diabetic.

And because human beings are inventive and operate with normalcy biases, we construct clever reasons for sugar cravings instead of asking why they exist. A grandmother who is fatigued all the time doesn’t know she has heart arrhythmia. She constructs a hobby of afternoon tea, normalizing her craving for pastries and caffeine, which is really a desperate quest for energy; everyone approves. Once her arrhythmia is diagnosed and treated, she puts the teacups away and takes up golf.

The most malnourished person I think I’ve ever met was a kid named Scotty the skateboarder whom our daughter briefly befriended in high school. Scotty lived on energy drinks and Frappuccinos. If I had to pick a solid food, I’d say French fries. Scotty had attention and behavioral problems such that ultimately the friendship ended. But during a period of time, our family invited him to join us for dinner at a few restaurants; he only ever ordered Coke.

It’s not hard to understand what must have happened somewhere along the way; maybe Scotty had ear infections as a kid and was over-prescribed antibiotics; he developed gut dysbiosis and food intolerances; his body was chronically zinc deficient, so he lost his appetite. He drank so many energy drinks, he couldn’t sleep at night; he overslept and missed school. Vicious cycles within cycles developed.

This is why I like to think of desserts as part of the whole meal, and I prefer cookbooks that address them in that way.

COOKIES

I like to keep shortbread on hand to serve with fruit or ice cream. There’s something about the purity of the buttery, barely-sweetened cookie that appeals to me. On holidays when we visit my parents in Paso Robles, California, we usually stop in at the Brown Butter Baking Company for their signature cookies, sprinkled with salt; they taste like the Central Coast to me. If I had to designate a Napa Valley cookie, it would be my extra virgin olive oil shortbread. I like shortbread, and I like olive oil cake, so it wasn’t a stretch to substitute my greenest, bitterest, most peppery EVOO for butter in a shortbread recipe one day.

The way I made it was to beat together 100 grams of sugar with 227 grams of olive oil, then add 340 grams of finely-milled, “extra fancy” durum flour and 1/2 tsp. of flaky salt. The batter had the consistency of river silt, so I scooped it into muffin tins to bake for 15 minutes or so at 375 degrees F. I didn’t touch the pans until they were completely cool, at which point the little pucks popped out nicely. I think there’s room to play with the recipe some more, but here’s what I wouldn’t do: add any additional flavorings. No lavender, no lemon rind. I want the austere, natural sweetness of the oil to shine through.

Wine Country Home Cooking: Desserts