You Should Be Putting Avocado In Your Desserts

Welcome to Health Goth, our column dedicated to cooking vegetables in ways that even our most cheeseburger-loving, juice-bar-loathing readers would approve of. Not everyone realizes this, but vegetables actually do taste good. We invite chefs to prove this assertion—and they do, time and time again.

You’d think we asked chef Maya Erickson to come dressed the part for this edition of Health Goth. On one of the nicest, sunniest days of the year, she arrives at the MUNCHIES Test Kitchen in all black, with chunky black sneakers and Emily the Strange bangs. She hails, of course, from Portland, Oregon, the epicenter of health goth culture. She is very much in her comfort zone.

Erickson is the pastry chef at Portland’s Langbaan, which is a two-seating per night Thai tasting menu spot whose menu changes monthly. This month, the menu is inspired by the chefs’ recent trip to southern Thailand together. Erickson’s dessert this month is an avocado semifreddo with a passionfruit curd, and she’s planning on making it for us today. “When we were there, there were more light, more tropical sort of fruits, so I kind of wanted to play with that,” she explains. “Avocado lends itself really well to dessert, and the passionfruit is really bright and tropical.”

Erickson, who is celebrating her 27th birthday while she’s visiting New York, started earning her bones in the industry while she was still in high school, where she staged for free at the now-closed Citizen Cake under heralded pastry chef Elizabeth Falkner in San Francisco. She made a name for herself as the pastry chef at the Michelin-starred Lazy Bear. Now, after her move to Portland and to Langbaan, she’s taken on a new challenge of cooking in a cuisine that she’s not wholly familiar with. She’s familiar with the Japanese food of her mother’s side of the family, but the Thai culinary vernacular was a bit of a departure for her.

“When I first started there, I was hyper-aware of being respectful to Thai food without it being, like, fusion. Or like, going straight to Thai iced tea ice cream,” she said. “But it is challenging because Thailand, and a lot of east Asian cultures, aren’t necessarily known for desserts. Thai food especially—if anyone thinks of Thai desserts, its automatically mango sticky rice and that’s it. For the most part, Thai desserts are a starch and sugar, maybe fruit, and that’s it. They’re all vaguely chewy and sweet.”

So this dessert, like many of her dishes, leans on the flavors and produce of Thai cooking, but greatly expands on the form. And luckily for us, it's incredibly easy to recreate at home.

She starts with the passionfruit curd. She whisks frozen passionfruit pulp (you could also use fresh passionfruit), eggs, sugar and coconut oil together in a small saucepan until the sugar is dissolved, constantly stirring so the egg can cook but not curdle. She strains the mixture to get rid of the passionfruit’s seeds and to make sure the curd is smooth, then sets it aside to cool.

She blooms a few sheets of gelatin in warm water for the semifreddo, and then blanches a generous handful of spinach, shocks it in ice water quickly, and wrings out excess water with her hands. This will add a vibrant green to the avocado semifreddo, but no spinachy flavor.

This all goes into the blender with coconut milk, sugar, lime juice, and the flesh of two perfectly ripe avocados. She blitzes the mixture until the spinach flecks are really small, then pours the whole thing out onto a small sheet pan lined with parchment. She pops it in the freezer.

While the semifreddo sets, she heads out to our rooftop garden—hooray! it's green again!—to pick some edible flowers for some dainty little garnishes. She finds some purple wild thyme blossoms that are cute and tiny and coos, "Kawaii!"

When she's harvested a rainbow of blooms and leaves, we head back inside. To plate the dish, she slices the frozen semifreddo into rectangles, and carefully spoons a dollop of the vibrant curd alongside it. At the restaurant, she would garnish with makrut lime whipped cream, but we're keeping it simple today. She does, however, break out the tweezers so she can perfectly arrange her edible flowers over the top.

When all is said and done, not only is this dish indeed adorable—so very kawaii—but it's also incredibly refreshing, delicious and light. We're thinking it'll be worth keeping a sheet pan of this on hand in the freezer all summer long.