Baking

Bananas are a good source of potassium, which is an important nutrient for lowering blood pressure. These bananas, enhanced with brown sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla extract, crown brown rice pudding, which is served barely warm.

Tarte Tatin is a French upside-down apple tart named for the two sisters who invented the dish. This version is topped with puff pastry and baked in a wood-fired oven or by indirect heat on a grill. It can be topped with slightly sweetened whipped cream, or better still with a frothy sabayon infused with an aromatic late-harvest Riesling. The sabayon is also terrific on its own or with berries. Choose a good baking or pie apple such as Gala, Pink Lady, Gravenstein, Braeburn, or Jonathan.

This dessert captures all the smells and tastes of fall. Similar to its cousin, pineapple upside-down cake, it is easily prepared in a cast-iron skillet, then turned out on a plate along with its syrup. Sweet potatoes serve as a binder and sweetener in this cake. Serve it with a dollop of tangy crème fraîche or a little warm caramel sauce.

This dessert is always a hit in my cooking classes. The combination of chocolate, cinnamon, and smoky chipotle often appears in Southwest American and Mexican cuisine, and the flavors marry beautifully in a wood-fired cooking environment. If you want a bit more heat, add more chile paste. You can also add a touch of chile powder to the Cinnamon-Caramel Sauce.

Many dense cakes such as pound cake can be grilled with great success. The grilling lightly toasts the cake and adds depth to the flavor. Here, Joanne Weir shares her favorite Mediterranean version, grilled polenta cake topped with seasonal berries tossed in a fruit sauce. Note: Make the cake a day in advance, and the berry compote several hours in advance so the flavors have time to blend.

For those who love to make simple seasonal fruit desserts, making a rustic tart is one of the most enjoyable ways of creating a beautiful dessert. A proper dough is important, but the overall shape created for the actual tart is up to you. In this recipe for an Italian tart, the pears and apples are first roasted until lightly caramelized, which increases their flavor.

Focaccia can be either savory or sweet. Topped with grapes, figs, and candied orange peel, it’s a great breakfast or brunch bread. This is one of the favorites from my cooking classes. You can substitute the grapes and figs with other fresh fruit such as strawberries and peaches. Keep the toppings light; don’t overload the focaccia.

This is one of my favorite desserts. Dried apricots, almonds, and honey are the key sweet flavors of the Mediterranean. With a nod to Provence, we top it all with Lavender Crème Anglaise.

Fran Gage is a wonderful pastry and bread maker as well as a cookbook author. She shares her special recipe for a marvelous fruit tart here. It is simple to make and quite delicious with its classic French apple and prune filling. Fran’s recipe for a sweet crust is wonderful and can be used for other fruit tarts.

This tart has a crunchy cornmeal crust filled with an earthy combination of wood-roasted mushrooms and chard paired with caramelized fennel and nutty cheese. If chanterelles or oyster mushrooms aren’t available, use all cremini mushrooms. The tart will still be sensational.

My dad enjoyed few desserts. For him, they needed to be simple and not very sweet. This uncomplicated cake, which he dubbed hobo cake because making it at campfire represented the simple life of a hobo, was one of his favorites. We enjoyed it at the campfire as well as around the comfort of our fireplace. You don’t have to be an accomplished baker to make this cake; it’s very easy and quite tasty. You can top each serving with a dollop of crème fraîche to bring it into the present time.

When I was growing up, my mom made this magical chocolate cake that doesn’t use eggs and is mixed in the pan it’s baked in. It’s the most moist chocolate cake I’ve ever tasted, and because no refrigerated ingredients are used, it’s perfect for camping. Crazy cake dates back to the Depression, but I don’t know where my mother found this recipe; it’s always been in her handwriting.

This is a very simple bread to make either at the campsite or at home. it requires no kneading, and is baked in a Dutch oven or clay baker. This bread’s flavor is developed through extended fermentation.

Peter Reinhart is a well-known cookbook author; his Crust and Crumb, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, and Whole Grain Breads have been graced with prestigious awards. At Ramekins, where he occasionally teaches bread classes, Peter and I baked bread and pizzas together in the wood-fired oven after his last class. This recipe came from his The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. It is an amazing formula that can be turned into baguettes, ciabatta, focaccia, and pizza. That baking session was about a lot more than the recipe. It was about the primary message of this book: joyfully cooking and sharing with others at the fire.

These stuffed flatbreads are shaped much like meat-filled galettes. Lamb is the meat of choice in many Mediterranean cuisines, and here it is combined with other key ingredients of the region—eggplant and pomegranate—along with the warm aromatics often used in Turkish cuisine.

Though pita bread is made throughout the Middle East, we have come to identify it with Greece. When baking, it puffs up like a small balloon and then deflates when removed from the oven. This version has a bit of whole-wheat flour in it for extra nuttiness and added flavor. Make a batch or two ahead and freeze some to use later; these pita reheat easily. Try these filled with strips of roasted Mustard and Lemon Chicken (page 92) and topped with a dollop of Greek yogurt.

Tim Decker and his wife, Crystal, are the owners of Bennett valley Bakery in Sonoma County. A former apprentice of Peter Reinhart’s, Tim makes artisan breads with a beautifully browned crust by baking them in a wood-fired oven at unusually high temperatures. You can also make this bread successfully in a conventional oven, with the heat as high as it will go.

Focaccia is one of the easiest flatbreads to make: No shaping is needed because the dough is stretched and spread out in the sheet pan. This recipe uses a very wet dough, resulting in a moist flatbread about 3/4 inch thick. You can substitute shavings of Parmesan for the ricotta salata cheese, if you like. Focaccia is best eaten the day it is baked.