Emily Swantner, an ethnic chef and cooking instructor in Santa Fe, and Pat Reed, a food writer at The New Mexican, recently agreed to collaborate on food stories for the newspaper. The two divided up the chores: Emily would do the cooking, and Pat would handle the words.

Their first assignment, Pat told Emily a few days later, was to review dessert cookbooks. Emily looked a tad forlorn. "I'm not a dessert person," she whimpered. (However, folks who have eaten Emily's cooking would swear she makes delicious sweets.)

Pat gave Emily a copy of the first cookbook to be reviewed, Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich, a San Francisco Bay area cook noted for her chocolate creations. And that cookbook was a revelation.

"I LOVE Pure Dessert from beginning to end," Emily e-mailed.


Pure Dessert is not your usual cookbook. Instead, it's about simple desserts made with interesting — and sometimes unusual — ingredients.

Many of those desserts are Medrich's inventions or innovations. And among the ingredients she uses are kamut, an ancient form of wheat that tastes surprisingly of butter; lebni cheese, which Medrich says is "like sour cream with soul"; and raw, molasses-tinged sugars such as muscovado or piloncillo.

Today, it's relatively easy to find a cookbook that tells the buyer how to make desserts. And a few of those cookbooks are devoted to baking at high altitudes. But what sets Medrich's dessert cookbook apart is an understanding, intuitive or learned, of how to create easy-to-make desserts with wonderful flavors.

"Faced with an overly sweet, complicated dessert or one made with mundane ingredients," she writes in her new cookbook, "I sometimes long instead for a bowl of good plain yogurt drizzled with honey and sprinkled with walnuts or pistachios, a piece of bittersweet chocolate, or some ripe figs.

"I haven't given up dessert, but when I eat it, I want it to taste as good as that bowl of yogurt or piece of chocolate. I want the soul satisfaction and the sensual pleasure of real flavors. The best chefs cook savory food simply, with the best ingredients. That's how I like to eat. Why don't we make more desserts that way?"

Why, indeed, don't we?

"The dessert repertoire needs an infusion of new and better ingredients and new approaches to working with them," Medrich says. "Authentic ingredients are important because they taste good. Simple recipes are essential because they allow us to savor that goodness."

The picture of one of Medrich's desserts, Lebni Tart, made with yogurt cheese, jumps off the cookbook page. "I've never seen anything like it in the Middle East," says Emily, who traveled extensively throughout that region when she lived in Saudi Arabia. And the Middle East is definitely yogurt country.

Medrich calls her Lebni Tart "the little white dress" of the dessert world, and its yogurt cheese filling is creamy, tangy but deliciously sweet.


While Medrich worked on Pure Dessert, trying to figure out what ingredients went with what, her learning curve was sometimes steep but exciting — and the results were often unexpected, she says.

Learning from her book what she figured out in her kitchen makes Pure Dessert an eye-opener. And she obviously spent many hours both succeeding and failing with her experiments.

Take ice cream: Medrich discovered fruit flavors are more intense in lean sorbets and sherbets than in ice creams made with cream or custard bases. Honey needs milk and cream, but not eggs, to make its delicate flavor shine. But Guinness Ice Cream, made with the beer of that name, craves a custard base to highlight its flavor.

Ice cream made with beer? Admittedly, that sounds less than tasty.

But Guinness beer makes a delicious ice cream, one that is cold and creamy as well as bitter and sweet, writes Medrich.

"Beer ice cream was both a revelation and an education," she says. "I began gently, with a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale from California and a Czech favorite, Pilsner Urquel. The beer-and-custard base instantly reminded me of sabayon, but with an elusive and compelling edge of bitterness. The addition of another egg yolk produced an even more delicious ice cream.

"Then, scavenging in the fridge, I found a lonely bottle of Guinness left over from a bout of making Christmas puddings, and I turned that into a sensational ice cream with a creamy dark caramel and malt flavor. It was especially fine with tiny ripe strawberries from my farmers' market."

Another example: When Medrich began testing strawberry-sorbet recipes, she made a sorbet with raw strawberries and another with cooked berries. "As expected," she writes, "the raw sorbet had a brighter, cleaner, fresher fruit flavor. Again, as expected, the cooked sorbet tasted too cooked. But it also had some deeper rounded strawberry flavors that were missing in the raw sorbet, and a smoother texture."

Medrich discovered she needed both raw and cooked fruit to get the best possible strawberry sorbet.


Ice cream, however, is not Medrich's main dessert. Instead, she divides her cookbook into chapters that experiment with the flavors of milk; grains, nuts and seeds; fruit; chocolate; honey and sugar; herbs, spices, flowers and leaves; and wine, beer and spirits.

In the milk chapter, she provides a recipe for Twice-Baked Shortbread, which she calls a "tender, buttery, crunchy" creation. (The shortbread calls for butter, which is made from milk.) "For the best flavor and texture, let the dough rest in the pan for at least 2 hours, or overnight, before baking," she writes. "A second short bake toasts each piece ever so slightly, adding extra flavor and resulting in a light, crunchier texture."

In her grains, nuts and seeds chapter, she points out that American cooks rarely know about all the grains and seeds that are commonplace in other parts of the world. Avid bread makers may know some of them. So, too, may people with wheat allergies.

But limiting whole grains to health foods is "to miss some of their glory. Used with finesse, whole grains and seeds — like nuts — star in delicate desserts and pastries, indulgent cakes, and tender cookies. Used strategically, they function in recipes just as ground nuts do, adding rich flavor, texture, and tenderness too."

As she experimented, Medrich learned buckwheat flour forms a love triangle with strawberries and cream; "chestnut flour makes the best meringues you may ever have tasted"; and bits of roasted cacao beans and chocolate complement stone-ground whole-wheat flour.

Medrich notes she wants chocolate desserts to offer the clear flavors of their chocolate. "When I take a bite of dessert, I want to savor the nutty or roasted flavors, the fruity and floral characteristics, smoky notes, or any nuance that can be tasted in the chocolate itself ... without distraction or excessive sweetness."

Her Italian Chocolate-Almond Torte is a product of that desire. In this cake, she uses unsweetened chocolate ground the size of bread crumbs, not melted. Grinding the chocolate, she writes, adds "layers of flavor" and provides "intense flavor while leaving the torte light and moist, rather than heavy and dense."

In the chapter on honeys and raw sugars, she notes the unrefined sugars have "nuances of earthiness, ripe fruit, or smoke" and the honeys offer a "floral, grassy, treacly character." That, not their sweetness, is what she finds important.

"I acted without prejudice against white sugar. ... My goal was to highlight and enjoy the taste, rather than to test the ability of honey or tropical sugar to replace white sugar."

She brought home a dozen raw and specialty sugars. "I compared colors, stuck my nose deep into the bags, and finally tasted. ... My samples varied in color and consistency from coarse crunchy grains with a light caramel hue and flavor ... to amber and russet sugars with the moist consistency of familiar supermarket brown sugar.

"Most compelling were the softer, darker sugars. At the top of the color and flavor spectrum, dark muscovado is deep mahogany brown, almost black, with dark flavors of molasses, ripe tropical fruits, and smoke. A whiff took me back to a night drive through a sugarcane field in Martinique more than 20 years ago."

Medrich began to understand that raw sugars are flavoring ingredients as well as sweeteners. "Repeatedly, I found that the most exciting recipes treat raw sugar as a star flavor."

But, as a serious chocolate lover, she could never stop using refined white sugar.

"The virtue of granulated white sugar — ultrarefined, pristinely clean, bleached, and stripped of all character and nutrients — is its very absence of flavor and its straight-ahead sweetening power," she writes. "It sweetens without interfering. It yields the stage to more important ingredients and, when used with finesse, it actually highlights other flavor. The finest chocolates are sweetened with white sugar, so we taste the pure flavors of the cacao. Chocolates sweetened with less refined sugar taste of the chocolate and the molasses in the sugar; the clarity and complexity of the cacao flavor is compromised."

When all was said and done, Medrich says, "finding the right balance or flavor combinations feels like a light suddenly switched on."

Pure Dessert: True flavors, inspiring ingredients and simple recipes by Alice Medrich (Artisan, 2007) Hard cover, 262 pages ($35)


Recipes

The recipes below have been adjusted for Santa Fe's altitude if necessary.

Lebni is a creamy smooth and tangy cheese, and it helps provide a pristine, delicately set ivory filling for this buttery crust. Although it needs nothing else, this tart welcomes accessories such as ripe strawberries (served alongside or sliced and arranged on top à la française) or roasted figs or plums. The only secret is not to overbake it, for, as with all custards and cheesecakes, the filling continues to bake after it emerges from the oven.

LEBNI TART

For the crust:
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup (4.5 ounces) all-purpose flour
For the filling:
3 extra-large eggs
1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1-1/2 cups (12 ounces) lebni (kefir cheese)*
1 extra-large egg yolk, lightly beaten with a pinch of salt

To make the crust, position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

In a medium bowl, combine the butter with the sugar, vanilla and salt. Add the flour and mix until well-blended. It the dough seems too soft and gooey, let it stand for a few minutes to firm.

Press the dough evenly over the bottom and up the sides of a 9-1/2-inch fluted tart pan with a removable bottom to make a very thin, even layer. This takes a little patience since there is just enough dough. To avoid ending up with extra-thick edges, press the dough squarely into the corners of the pan. Place the pan on a cookie sheet.

Bake until the crust is deep, golden brown, 20 to 25 minutes, checking after about 15 minutes or so to see if the dough has puffed up from the bottom of the pan. If it has, lift and gently slam the cookie sheet down to settle the dough or press the dough down with the back of a fork and prick it a few times.

Meanwhile, make the filling (somewhat surprisingly, the order in which the ingredients are mixed makes a big difference in the smoothness of the tart, so proceed without deviation). In a medium bowl, whisk the eggs with the sugar, salt and vanilla. Whisk in the cheese.

When the crust is ready, remove it from the oven and turn the temperature down to 325 degrees. Brush the bottom of the crust with a thin layer of the beaten egg yolk to moisture-proof it. Return the crust to the oven for 1 minute to set the yolk.

Pour the filling into the hot crust and spread it evenly. Return the tart to the oven and bake until the filling is set around the edges but, when the pan is nudged, it quivers like very soft Jell-O in the center, about 15 to 20 minutes. Check often in the last few minutes, since overbaking will destroy the silky-smooth texture of the filling. Cool the tart completely on a rack. Refrigerate if not serving immediately.

*If lebni is not available, you can use Mediterranean Cheese Style Yogurt from Trader Joe's.


Fresh fig season had ended a few weeks before Emily Swantner made this dish. She used dried figs instead, adjusting Alice Medrich's recipe calling for fresh figs to use the dried fruit.

CARDAMOM-ROASTED FIGS

18 to 20 cardamom pods
18 to 10 dried figs, either black mission figs or Calimyrna figs or a combination of the two
2-1/2 tablespoons of sugar, or to taste
2-1/2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar, or to taste

Remove the tough stems from the dried figs and soak in hot water to cover by 2 inches for 30 minutes. Reserve 1/4 cup of the soaking water.

Position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Use a heavy object such as a mallet or skillet to lightly smash each of the cardamom pods so you can remove the papery outer covering. Remove the seeds from each pod. Use a small paring knife to push the seeds into 18 or 20 tiny heaps (depending on how many figs you have). Cut a small gash in the side of each fig. Use the moist figgy knifepoint to scoop up and place one heap of seeds inside each fig. Put the stuffed figs in the baking dish and sprinkle with the sugar. Drizzle the vinegar and reserved soaking water over the figs.

Cover a 1-1/2- to 2-quart baking dish tightly with foil and bake until the figs are tender and the juices are thickened and syrupy, 1 hour to 1 hour and 15 minutes. If the juices are still thin and copious toward the end of baking, uncover the dish for the last 10 to 15 minutes, checking frequently until the juices are reduced and syrupy (they will thicken even further on cooling). If the syrup gets too thick, add a little water. Toward the end, taste the syrup and adjust the sugar and/or vinegar if needed.

Serve the figs warm or hot. They can be kept in a covered container in the refrigerator for at least a week. Reheat them in the microwave, if desired.


Don't be afraid of the olive oil: Extra virgin olive oil with sherry and a hint of fresh orange zest produces a subtle and flavorful cake, not overly sweet, with a satisfying close-grained texture. This cake improves after a day or two, and toasted slices are nice for breakfast even as much as a week later.

OLIVE OIL AND SHERRY POUND CAKE

3-1/3 cups plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
2 scant tablespoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1-2/3 cups sugar
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons flavorful extra-virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons grated orange zest (from 1 medium orange)
6 extra-large cold eggs
1 cup plus 1 tablespoon (amontillado) sherry

Position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Grease and flour a 10- to 12-cup tube or Bundt pan or two 8 by 4-inch (4 cups) loaf pans. (Or, if you prefer, line the bottom and sides of the loaf pans with parchment.)

Mix the flour, baking powder and salt thoroughly in a large bowl and sift together. Set aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer (with the whisk attachment if you have one), beat the sugar, oil and orange zest on high speed until well-blended. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition; continue to beat until the mixture is thick and pale, 3 to 5 minutes. Stop the mixer and add one-third of the flour mixture. Beat on low speed until blended. Stop the mixer and add half the sherry. Beat just until blended. Repeat with another third of the flour, followed by the remaining sherry and then the remaining flour.

Scrape the batter into the pan(s). Bake until the cake tester comes out clean, 40 to 50 minutes for either the tube pan or the loaves. Cool the cake in the pan(s) on a rack for about 15 minutes before unmolding.

If using a tube pan, slide a skewer around the tube. If the sides of the pan are straight, slide a thin knife or spatula around the sides to release the cake (unless lined with paper). If using a Bundt or other decorative pan, tap one side of the pan against the counter to release the cake; then tap the other side. Invert the cake onto a rack. Turn the preferred side up before cooling the cake completely.

Wrapped airtight, the cake keeps well at room temperature for up to 3 days; it can be frozen for up to 3 months.