5 Ingredients or Fewer

Unlike some of the other frozen yogurts in this book, I only make this with plain, unstrained yogurt. Since the peach purée is so velvety thick, this frozen yogurt has a lovely consistency when frozen.

The Belgians have their own version of gingersnaps, called speculoos (SPEC-oulooze). They’re meant to be nibbled alongside the copious amounts of beer that Belgians drink, which was one of the many lessons I learned when I went to chocolate school there, at Callebaut College. The Belgians like their beer so much that the outdoor beer gardens are busy all year long, even during the freezing cold winters. You have to brush the snow off your table to put down your glass! The good news is that you don’t have to worry about your beer getting warm. Back home, I found that speculoos go equally well when crumbled and folded into lemon ice cream, which can be consumed any time of the year.

My well-meaning hostess, knowing that I had come to Italy to sample chocolate and gelato, planned a special dinner in my honor. As we drove up the mountain to the restaurant, she turned to me and said, “We’ve arranged a special dinner just for you. Each and every course is going to have chocolate in it!” Gulp. Dinner was, um, interesting, and chocolate was indeed incorporated into each and every course—except for dessert! However, the chef presented us with a selection of ice creams, including one flavored with a fruity, locally pressed olive oil. Olive oil ice cream pairs remarkably well with summer fruits such as strawberries and apricots, and if you use a fruity Spanish Arbequina olive oil, you’ll find this ice cream is sublime drizzled with Lean Chocolate Sauce (page 165) too. Be sure to try it flecked with a few grains of coarse sea salt over the top.

After a big meal, when I feel like I can’t eat another bite, I like a dessert that’s been infused with an intriguing flavor, like Szechwan pepper, to coax my taste buds back to life. This ice cream starts off comfortably, with the familiar flavor of orange, and then comes alive with a kick from the Szechwan peppercorns.

Surprisingly, a lot of people have never seen a fresh fig. When they do, they invariably ask, “What is that?” Indeed, a majority of the fig harvest gets dried and made into the familiar bar cookies. But fresh figs have a sweet succulence that is unmatched by their dried counterparts. A fig is ripe when the sides crack and split and a dewy drop of juice starts to ooze from the tiny hole in the bottom. Once picked, figs don’t ripen any more, so buy only figs that are dead-ripe. For best results, use Black Mission figs, which will give the ice cream a lovely deep-violet color.

This ice cream combines the best of two worlds: deeply caramelized sugar and sweet, juicy pears. Use the ripest, most flavorful pears you can find, since you want the flavor of the pears to stand up to the slightly burnt taste of the caramel. I recommend Comice or Bartlett pears, which have a heady, roselike aroma when ripe. Don’t be alarmed if the sugar hardens and crackles when you add the pears. Keep cooking, and the pears will dissolve the caramelized sugar nicely.

If you’re lucky enough to live in an area where fresh apricots are bountiful in the summer, be sure to take advantage of their brief season by churning up a batch of this ice cream. Don’t be put off by apricots that are übersoft, as plump and fragile as an overfilled water balloon, seemingly ready to burst at the slightest touch. Those are invariably the best-tasting fruits.

For many years, I was delighted to work with Lindsey Shere, the founding pastry chef at Chez Panisse. She was constantly surprising us with amazing fruits and berries from neighbors’ backyards and nearby farms. Without fail, Lindsey would come in one weekend each summer carrying a big plastic Tupperware container, which, due to its distinctive rounded shape, left no question that it was precisely designed to hold a canned ham. But instead of a ham, inside would be a jumble of tiny, tender, smushed wild plums picked by her mother. Eaten raw, they were puckery-tart, but once stewed, they made an incredibly flavorful plum ice cream. Each year I would wait patiently for that one late-summer weekend when Lindsey would walk though the door lugging her now-infamous canned ham container. Although wild plums may be hard to come by, you can use whatever plums are available with equal success.

Bill Fujimoto, the produce expert at Monterey Market in Berkeley, grew up in Japan. He once told me about the produce market where his father worked, which featured a wall covered with tarantulas, each individually nailed in place. In days past, native islanders would hoist bunches of bananas onto ships heading landward, and the bananas would sometimes include a little something extra from the jungle lurking beneath the stem. Sometimes people would bring home bananas only to discover an unwelcome houseguest the next day, enjoying a morning stroll across the kitchen counter. In spite of their risky reputation, bananas have become the most popular, and least intimidating, fruit in America. I’ve eaten more than my fair share and have yet to see any hazardous signs of life. (But that doesn’t mean I don’t take a peek every now and then.) Roasting bananas in butter and brown sugar gives them a deep, rich butterscotch flavor, which enhances their abundant natural sweetness.

What do you say when a nice Jewish boy gives up a promising career as a lawyer to become a self-appointed “amateur gourmet”? (“Oy!” his mom probably said.) When the audacious amateur himself, Adam Roberts, used my recipe for Strawberry Frozen Yogurt (page 91) as inspiration for churning up a batch of Sour Cherry Frozen Yogurt, he posted the results on his web site, www.amateurgourmet.com. It was an idea too delicious not to include in this book. However, when pressed for minor details like, say, a recipe or exact quantities, Adam played the amateur card and feigned ignorance, forcing a certain professional to do his duty. This recipe calls for sour cherries, which are different from their sweeter counterparts and sometimes require a bit of foraging to find (Adam found his at Manhattan’s Greenmarket). Their tiny little pits can easily be slipped out by squeezing the cherries with your fingers or with the help of a cherry pitter.

I love, love, love dried apricots. They’re one of my favorite foods on earth, as long as they’re the ones from California. People are often tempted by Turkish and Chinese dried apricots, since they’re usually more colorful and far more plump (and cheaper), but I find them terribly sweet, and ice cream made with them lacks the delicious flavor and intensity of dried apricots. The combination of pistachio nuts and apricots is particularly good. Don’t toast the pistachio nuts or they’ll lose their lovely green hue. Make sure the pistachio nuts you’re using are fresh and crisp.

This curious combination of flavors will surprise you, as it did the unsuspecting friends I invited over to taste test it. One was so enamored of it that she kept digging her spoon in until the container was scraped clean! I like to serve this with warm oven-baked pears. Not only do they taste very good together, but the combination does double duty as the cheese course and the dessert. A few helpful tips: You can replace the Roquefort with a favorite blue cheese, with excellent results. Also, if your honey is very strong, you may wish to use the smaller amount indicated. And be a bit careful when making the custard; because it has no sugar, it will cook quickly.

The Marché d’Aligre is the liveliest market in Paris. In the center, there’s a marvelous épicerie, with bins brimming with things familiar and unusual: various grains and spices, plump dried fruits, organic honey, bars of chocolate, and artisan candies from all over France. It’s my one-stop shop for anything délicieux! When I stopped by to get some lavender flowers, José Ferré, the proprietor, shooed me away from the basket in his window and stepped into the back room. A minute later he returned dragging an enormous sack of dark purple lavender flowers that had just arrived from Provence. He gestured toward the bag, so I stuck my head in and inhaled deeply. The perfumed bouquet of the freshly harvested lavender flowers was ethereal. Of course, those lavender flowers made amazing ice cream. Try to find the most fragrant lavender flowers you can, wherever you live, and be sure to use lavender flowers that are intended for consumption.

The first time I ever saw fresh goat cheese was when we started serving it on salads at Chez Panisse. This being Berkeley, most of the customers thought it was tofu. Nowadays goat cheese has become far more familiar. Especially in Berkeley. Adding goat cheese to ice cream gives it the surprising taste of a blue-ribbon cheesecake. Use a moist, fresh goat cheese for best results.

When I first started to travel to France regularly, the French, when they found out I was American, would rhapsodize “J’adore le Philadelphia!” It took me a while to realize they were enthralled with our cream cheese, which is indeed worthy of international acclaim. They’ve adopted cheesecake too, calling it le gâteau fromage or simply le cheesecake.

Crème fraîche is the cultured French cousin to American sour cream, although it’s far richer and more unctuous, with a distinct nutty-tangy-sweet flavor. This ice cream is made in a slightly different manner than other recipes, since mixing the crème fraîche with the other ingredients too far in advance can cause the whole batch to turn into a whole lot of crème fraîche, perhaps more than you bargained for.

Maybe I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. When I visited the Chartreuse distillery in the French Alps, our guide told us that the exact recipe for the famed herbal liqueur was a closely guarded secret, known only by three brothers who worked at the monastery. Astounded, I spoke up. “Wow, that’s incredible. What is the likelihood of three brothers going into the same business together, as well as becoming monks at the same monastery?” The other guests on the tour simply stopped and looked at me with their mouths slightly agape. Then our guide enlightened me and we moved on, but not before I overheard a few hushed conversations evaluating my intellect. This is a very light ice cream, and it’s so simple that anyone, regardless of their intelligence level, can easily put it together.

This ice cream is for those who are nostalgic for those orange-and-cream-flavored popsicles. If you miss that taste, you’ll discover it again here.

The cleansing zing of fresh ginger is always welcome after dinner. Its not-so-subtle spiciness is a pleasing juxtaposition to the cool creaminess of ice cream. Ginger is also reputed to aid digestion, and adding nuggets of soft Dark Chocolate Truffles (page 211) or layering the ice cream with Stracciatella (page 210) would certainly make this “medicine” go down quite easily.

A few years back, I visited Tokyo for the first time, and while there I detected a curious flavor in one of the desserts I tasted. None of the pastry-chef students I was there to teach was able to tell me exactly what it was. But later, when a couple of the students and I were poking around at the 100-yen shop (the fabulously fun Japanese equivalent of a 99¢ store), I randomly picked up a packet of beige powder with a colorful riot of Japanese lettering. My easily enthused guides got even more enthused, letting me know that I’d found exactly what I was looking for. When I got home, I discovered kinako in my local Japanese food shop and learned that it was roasted soybean powder. It has a taste similar to roasted nuts but more elusive and certainly more exotic.