Dessert Can Save the World by Christina Tosi

Author:Christina Tosi [Tosi, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2022-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

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To be perfectly clear: I love recipes. I love creating them and sharing them. I dream about them, spend hours studying and tweaking and perfecting them, write books about them. I’ve built my entire business on selling the finished product of my recipes. I have mad respect for the precision and science of baking.

But…(You knew that was coming, didn’t you?)

I also have a deep and abiding love for playing in the kitchen without a prescribed goal or agenda. There’s big satisfaction to be had from putting the exact right number of turns in your croissant or feeding your sourdough starter. But a joyful ride through your imagination and your cupboards isn’t about routine or technique or how ingredients come together. There’s no duty or precision in this game. It’s about asking, “What if…?” without expectation that there’s only one right answer, or even any answer at all. There’s no pressure of “Did I do it right?” or “Will anyone like this?” So many people get that rigidity and fear of judgment drilled into them at an early age, and it becomes hard to let go and get back to wonder.

I once got to imagining what a grilled cheese cheesecake with tomato sorbet would taste like. The upshot: it’s not great. But long before I got to that decisive conclusion, I got busy with American cheese to see how I could get a square of flimsy, waxy cheese with a ton of emulsifiers in it to act like cream cheese. You can’t melt it in the microwave because it congeals almost right away into a more plasticky thing than it was originally. If I pureed it at a high speed in the blender it would get to the consistency I wanted—but only for a minute. Every time I stopped the blender, it would set like a Jell-O Jiggler. By the time I was done poking and prodding and mashing up every square of cheese in the package, I’d learned everything there is to possibly know about how to work with this one base ingredient. To what end? Maybe nothing other than feeding the curious side of my brain that needs to play with food and gets a big jolt of unfettered, creative happy from doing so.

Nowadays, at least once a week I’ll pull out my materials and tinker in the kitchen while I’m on calls. No recipes, no deadline, no limitations on what I need to make or bake. It feeds me. No matter how well or how badly it goes, it’s still good because I get all the sparks of energy from bending and breaking rules in the kitchen, playing without the confines of structure or judgment. And really, who doesn’t want and need more of that?

I remember standing in my kitchen on Inauguration Day 2021 as I started tinkering with Snaps for fun. A Milk Bar Snap, in case you haven’t had one, is a snappy cookie on the bottom, then a flavorful spreadable layer like a

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