USING DESSERTS TO DOCUMENT ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
BY CRAFTING PASTRY IN THE WILD BACKCOUNTRY
It’s one thing to make desserts in a kitchen or a restaurant. While I had doubts whether it would work, I felt my edible art would have greater impact if it was crafted on the glaciers and in the forests that were being affected by climate change, using the earth as an ingredient. With a combined 100 pounds of butter, sugar, flour, heavy cream, eggs, tools, and fresh local sourdough starter strapped to our backs, chef Rose Wilde and I spent a week trekking into the wilds of Alaska to film the creation of these desserts in their “natural environments” — aiming to merge pastry arts and climate change, and using video to bring people around the world on this visual journey with us. We stopped to forage along the way: wild salmonberries, fireweed blossoms, watermelon berries, pineapple weed, and late autumn blueberries littered the bright red tundra.
Camp stove ablaze, we simmered three colorful jams and whisked together an herbal pastry cream, using everything we had foraged along the way. We infused sugar with wildflowers and fried brioche dough under the thick canopy of America’s northernmost temperate rainforest. Hot donuts burst with the diversity of flora among the ferns and accumulated biomass. I ignited my JetBoil, cooked sugar, and moved hard candy atop a glacier to demonstrate the valley’s crevasse breaking patterns. Transparent raindrop cakes – made with nothing but freshwater glacial runoff and seaweed gel — encased the plants we collected along the way, showing the succession of regrowth after glacial recession.
Through desserts, I learn how interconnected we are as a human species. I learn how we are tied to our planet. I learn about the way glaciers form, move, and retreat. I learn about endemic and invasive species. I learn about human impact. I learn about Indigenous groups and systemic environmental racism. I learn personal stories. I learn ways to tell these stories through edible art: how to depict the loss of a specific habitat, or the miraculous expansion of a protected area, or the interconnectedness of an environment visually, on cake. I learn who I am: both my responsibility to my planet and my responsibility to encourage others to spark new ways of interacting with our world.
Learn more about this project here:
Article for Artists and Climate Change
Camp stove ablaze, we simmered three colorful jams and whisked together an herbal pastry cream, using everything we had foraged along the way. We infused sugar with wildflowers and fried brioche dough under the thick canopy of America’s northernmost temperate rainforest. Hot donuts burst with the diversity of flora among the ferns and accumulated biomass. I ignited my JetBoil, cooked sugar, and moved hard candy atop a glacier to demonstrate the valley’s crevasse breaking patterns. Transparent raindrop cakes – made with nothing but freshwater glacial runoff and seaweed gel — encased the plants we collected along the way, showing the succession of regrowth after glacial recession.
Through desserts, I learn how interconnected we are as a human species. I learn how we are tied to our planet. I learn about the way glaciers form, move, and retreat. I learn about endemic and invasive species. I learn about human impact. I learn about Indigenous groups and systemic environmental racism. I learn personal stories. I learn ways to tell these stories through edible art: how to depict the loss of a specific habitat, or the miraculous expansion of a protected area, or the interconnectedness of an environment visually, on cake. I learn who I am: both my responsibility to my planet and my responsibility to encourage others to spark new ways of interacting with our world.
Learn more about this project here:
Article for Artists and Climate Change
"Rose was gracious enough to let me tag along as she illustrated glacial processes through the art of pastry. I have never experienced or seen backcountry pastry before and to know that is possible and to see it before my eyes was quite cool.
Rose is able to show the processes of the glacier to those who may not be able to come out onto the glacier physically and explain why it's important that we protect our Arctic environments. To be able to illustrate that through the culinary arts — to bring that to a wider range of audiences — is super exciting and I'm stoked to see where she takes this project."
- Jordan, Alaskan glacier guide
Rose is able to show the processes of the glacier to those who may not be able to come out onto the glacier physically and explain why it's important that we protect our Arctic environments. To be able to illustrate that through the culinary arts — to bring that to a wider range of audiences — is super exciting and I'm stoked to see where she takes this project."
- Jordan, Alaskan glacier guide
