COVER STORY
tastes so much like tart apple pie. I was just like, this is perfect. For me it’s about taking something familiar and pushing it a little, whether that’s turning lime leaves into a dust or turning something like tomatillos into a dessert. I’m always looking for ways to play with flavor, texture, and color while still making something that feels approachable.” Retail Executive Chef Jeremy Jones of Cal Poly Campus dining in San Luis Obispo was listening to his students when he added açai and mango sorbet bowls to The Health Shake. “It’s a 6x6- foot shack,” he says. “Literally the size of a tool shed.” Located close to the library, it’s big enough to offer quick and healthy wraps, avocado toast, and more recently, a frozen açai purée bowl with bananas, strawberries, blueberries and housemade granola and also a frozen mango sorbet bowl with the same toppings. They did sampling tables before they stocked them to make sure students knew what açai was, and it wasn’t long before the tropical fruit bowls made it to the menu. “They’re vibrant, really pretty and go well in hot or cold weather,” he says. “Plus, they are easy on our staff to produce good quality consistently.” Jones has also done dessert poke bowls with coconut rice and mango purée, and pineapple cinnamon upside-down cakes at other campus venues. “I’m a big fan of ‘you eat with your eyes first’ and usually a lot of those tropical fruits are vibrant, pretty, and really pop, so that’s the direction we’re going with a few of our venues.” If anyone holds a place in their heart for tropical fruit it’s Nicole White. The executive chef of catering for University of Utah Dining powered by Chartwells Higher Education hails from South Africa. “It’s very much down in the tropics and one of the things I love is that we have those great flavors of guava and passion fruit, which you don’t necessarily get in America,” says White. “I wanted to introduce that into my style of cooking.”
To close out a Valentine’s Day menu for a private staff event, she made a coconut lime panna cotta with passion fruit coulis, guava strawberry gelée, hibiscus meringue and dust and dried strawberries. She made the panna cotta with coconut milk, lime zest, sugar, and vanilla in mini bundt cake molds, and used guava purée for the gelée and passion fruit purée for the coulis. “It’s very difficult to get in passion fruit and guava, especially in winter, and the ones that you do get in aren’t always ripe enough. So the purée is a great way to kind of introduce people to the tropical flavors.” Dried hibiscus flowers go into mini meringues and get crushed for a slightly floral dust that gets sprinkled on the plate. “With the bright yellow at the bottom, the white dessert, and the red on top, it was very pretty. But I wanted to kind of mess it up a little bit so I added the dust. I am not the kind of chef that has three-dots-and-a- circle kind of thing. I like to play around with my food and make sure everything’s a fun experience.” White says she also likes ending particularly heavy meals with tropical fruits. “You don’t want to eat a chocolate cake after you’ve had meatloaf. It’s just it’s too heavy,” she says. “This dessert is more like an aperitif you have after your meal. So you’re not leaving feeling bloated and heavy, just refreshed.” White has also used hibiscus in a floral soup and passion fruit in a buttercream frosting for sugar cookies served at catered events on campus. At home she’ll caramelize star fruit and serve it with crèpes, whipped cream, macadamia nuts, and brown sugar, “There’s nothing on this planet like it,” she says.
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QUARTERLY | Q2
PHOTO COURTESY OF HHS
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