A tiny little black seed is taking the pastry world by storm. Flavor of the month? Absolutely not -- for pastry chefs from Paris to Tokyo, from Los Angeles to New York and over to Spain, it's the flavor of the year.
Black sesame seeds -- earthy and nutty, distinctively bitter, with a smoky, almost peppery flavor -- are appearing in tuiles and \o7macarons\f7, ice creams and eclairs, cakes and panna cottas and doughnuts.
This is no mere trendy garnish. "It's a staple," says Johnny Iuzzini, pastry chef at Jean Georges in New York City. "It isn't overly sweet or cloying so it helps maintain the integrity of other ingredients in a dessert." Iuzzini uses black sesame seeds in the ganache for his chocolates. Other New York and Los Angeles chefs are using them in ice cream and creme brulee; at the new Patisserie Chantilly in Lomita, Keiko Nojima is featuring them in cream puffs and atop white sesame blancmange, a cooked pudding.
At El Bulli north of Barcelona, pastry chef Albert Adria has fallen for the seeds. With a handful or two, he has fashioned the spiral, a hypnotic swirl of black sesame crunch, dehydrated raspberries and lime gelatin, with a quenelle of coconut ice cream. Another dessert, \o7gran creu negra\f7, an outsize cross of smeared black sesame paste with chocolate-lime sorbet and chocolate cake, is Adria's homage to abstract-expressionist Catalan painter Antoni Tapies.
At all-dessert restaurant Espai Sucre in nearby Barcelona, chef Jordi Butron is known for a lapsang souchong tea cream with chocolate cake, black sesame tuile and yogurt.
Even in Paris, black sesame seeds are making a showing. At the very chic Patisserie Sadaharu Aoki, the black sesame \o7macarons\f7 and black sesame eclairs are among the most popular pastries, says spokeswoman Sandra Bourdier. Pastry chef Aoki also uses black sesame in chocolate bars, ice cream and truffles.
They've long been a traditional ingredient in Asian sweets. So what is it about the little seeds that's now captivating Western chefs? "It reminds me of toasted sunflower seeds that I ate in my childhood that in Spain are colloquially called \o7pipas\f7," says Adria, brother and partner of chef Ferran Adria.
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An edgier sweetness
