Great dishes are all about balanced flavors, and more chefs than ever are contrasting sweet and savory in the most unlikely of places — on their dessert menus. You may cringe a bit at the idea of bacon ice cream, served recently as part of a tasting menu at Cochon, but who doesn’t love a chocolate chip cookie that’s a little salty as well as sweet? Caramels with sea salt have become another new classic. Lacroix’s kitchen fuses the sweetness of chocolate and coconut with the nutty flavor of sesame in its Thai ganache, and over at James, they turn strong gorgonzola cheese into a semifreddo.

I like bold flavor combinations wherever I find them, but a creative balancing act can really take the doldrums out of the dessert course.

Image, lacroixrestaurant.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 6:06 am and is filed under Joy Manning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted by Joy Manning on 3/5/08 in Joy Manning