5 Ingredients or Fewer

The trick to cooking quinces is to maintain their fragrance and delicate flavor while you coax them into tenderness. Gentle poaching is an ideal way to achieve this goal. Use poached quinces interchangeably with poached pears. They’re great with chocolate, with cheese, or with walnuts and arugula as a salad. If you’ve saved vanilla pods from other recipes, use them here in place of fresh beans.

Fresh sour cherries are best, but you can also make this recipe with frozen morello cherries. These cherries will keep in the refrigerator for several months and are fantastic spooned over ice cream or a simple cake or even dropped into a glass of champagne with a little of their syrup.

This simple technique yields amazing results, intensifying the flavor of the strawberries so that each one explodes on your palate. The strawberries I use are small, local, day-neutral or “ever-bearing” varieties like Tristar, which come from local farmers. You can roast larger berries, but they will take longer and they won’t be as sweet.

Sometimes you don’t need to manipulate an ingredient to get the most out of it. The simple roasting here gets to the best flavors in the apricots.

The warm richness of pear and the earthiness of cumin combine to create a new flavor that to me is the epitome of fall. This granité isn’t too sweet, so you could also serve it as a middle course of a big dinner, before the meat. You could substitute sparkling apple cider mixed with an equal amount of pear puree for the pear cider.

The caramel notes of this sherry lend themselves well to the fruits available in autumn.

Dessert wines are usually too sweet for me, so I introduce the natural acids of fresh fruit or berries for balance, as in this granité. Serve this over berries or add it to a margarita.

I love champagne and it’s a natural in desserts. This sorbet captures the airiness and effervescence of the wine, and adding a hint of lemon makes it super-refreshing. Champagnes differ in their sugar contents, which will affect whether or not the sorbet will freeze, so be sure to use Veuve Clicquot yellow label for this recipe.

Tomatoes are technically a fruit, and that’s how I treat them. This sorbet, which should be made at the height of tomato season with the ripest fruits, showcases that characteristic sweet-acid tomato flavor in its coldest form. A scoop of this sorbet can be the start of a not-so-traditional Bloody Mary, and it could also find its way into a bowl of gazpacho. Try pairing it with the Raspberry-Rose Water Soup (page 62), too.

Rhubarb is paired with strawberry so often, but I like showcasing the pungent, tangy flavor all on its own. Combining this sorbet with White Chocolate Ice Cream (page 221) softens the edge. If your rhubarb isn’t very ripe and red, you may want to adjust the color with a few drops of pomegranate juice.

The intriguing lemony/orangey flavor of Meyer lemons is so refreshing; this sorbet captures the fruit’s essence and perfume. The Salt Butter Shortbread (page 202) is great with it, but, really, this sorbet needs no accompaniment.

The jolting flavor of passion fruit really explodes on the palate. Serve this with passion fruit seeds on a hot day. Or combine it with some meringues and strawberries.

The goal when making any sorbet is to capture the purity of ripe fruit while making the smoothest texture possible. This sorbet does that beautifully for ripe summer strawberries.

This may be the epitome of freshness, a perfect balance of sweet and tart, with the crispness of the apple apparent, even in sorbet form. Be prepared: This can take a very long time to freeze in a home ice cream maker.

Who doesn’t like rum and Coke? And those flavors make a great ice cream.

This very rich ice cream, with the lush mouthfeel of white chocolate, may be one of my sweetest recipes. Try serving it with ripe peaches and a drizzle of tarragon oil or basil oil (see page 187). You should be aware that this ice cream can take a long time to freeze in a home ice cream maker, and that it will need to cure in the freezer overnight before serving.

These elegant nuts are a great accent to summer fruits. If you can find the longer, thinner pistachios from Sicily, use them for this recipe—or any time you’re eating pistachios. They have the best flavor.

What I like most about this caramel is the balance the salt provides; you taste caramel, not sugar. The key to making this is cooking the honey long enough so it just crosses from being sweet to bitter. You could use this as a crunchy topping for ice cream. Or pour it into a ring mold when you make it and use it as a layer in a cake.

I often put these nuts under ice cream, but they make a great bar snack, too.

This recipe makes more than you will need for the Rhubarb-Flan Tarts on page 40, but you can use it for any fruit cobbler or crisp or crumble. I love those kinds of desserts.