Five Ingredients, Five Continents — Cross-cultural desserts with a five-ingredient pantry
A pantry of five ingredients is, in dessert terms, quite a lot. With sugar, butter, eggs, flour, and a single distinctive thing — cardamom, rose water, palm sugar, coconut — you can travel from Tehran to Yogyakarta to Buenos Aires without leaving the kitchen.
I. Persian Saffron-Almond Bites
Toasted ground almonds, a thread of saffron, icing sugar, rose water, an egg white — pressed into small lozenges and baked at 150 °C. A direct cousin of ricciarelli with the Persian fragrance dialled up. · More from this tradition →
II. Coconut-Palm-Sugar Rice Balls
Glutinous rice flour, grated palm sugar, coconut milk, salt, pandan extract. Boil into klepon-style molten-centre balls — the building blocks are everywhere a Malay archipelago lives. · More from this tradition →
III. Cardamom-Honey Yoghurt
Strained Greek yoghurt, honey, cardamom, vanilla, pistachios. A direct line to Levantine malabi with the substitution of cultured dairy for set cornstarch. · More from this tradition →
IV. Dulce-de-Leche Toast
A slice of brioche, butter, banana, dulce de leche, flaky salt. A South American breakfast you can call dessert. · More from this tradition →
V. Matcha-Cream Mochi
Sweet rice flour, sugar, water, matcha-cream, salt. Five ingredients and you're at ichigo daifuku's door. · More from this tradition →
VI. Honey-Walnut Filo Bites
Filo pastry, butter, honey, walnuts, cinnamon. The thrift kitchen's kataifi. · More from this tradition →
∞. Where to go next
If this collection found something useful, the place to keep going is the full A-Z catalogue or one of the cuisine pages. New essays appear weekly on the essays index.