Tapioca

With loads of juicy blackberries and an easy lattice crust, this may just be the world’s most perfect pie.

This easy tart cherry pie recipe highlights the sweet-tart fruit and has a wonderfully flaky double crust.

Our favorite recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie gets a crumb topping with cinnamon and brown sugar and a flaky, buttery bottom crust for the best of both worlds.

Made with sweetened black tea, milk, and black tapioca pearls, this classic milk tea recipe is sweet, creamy, and delicious.

Deep-fried tofu gets braised with shiitake mushrooms in soy sauce and Chinese wine for this easy dish.

Iced tea with tapioca pearls that are sucked from a large straw are perhaps Taiwan’s most famous culinary export.

Beneath a humble, oaty streusel topping lies a sleek, inky jumble of plums and blackberries—talk about a delicious contrast. A combination of cornstarch and tapioca in the filling helps to keep the colors of the fruit true and to set up their juices nicely without becoming too thick.

Creamy coconut tapioca pudding with glazed pineapple is one of the desserts I obsessed over when I lived in New York City and worked for François Payard. All of the cooks at Payard Patisserie spent our free time talking about the places we dreamed of going and the dishes we couldn't wait to try. One of the cooks told me about how Claudia Fleming, at the time the pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern, had created a dreamy tapioca that could not be missed. He was right—on one of my last nights in NYC, I was finally able to try it, and thereafter every time I went to visit NYC, I made a point of going back to order it again. Sadly, it's no longer on the menu, but I've channeled it here in this version. It's light and refreshing and uses the natural sugars of mango, pineapple, and apple juice to complement the richness of the coconut milk.

Tapioca, like semolina, is one of those things that a school kitchen could have turned you off for life. I couldn't eat it for years, having been force-fed it at primary school aged six, with tinned jam, as it oozed like frogspawn out of the bowl and I wept and retched. For years I had the same malicious feeling toward beets and mashed potatoes, which were instant and came in lumpy granules. My teacher and I had a silent war every lunchtime; a war that eventually came to an end after my parents removed me from the school. Made to your own wont, in your own kitchen, tapioca is ambrosial, and worth being a grown-up for, as is semolina. This could also be a pudding, not a breakfast, just don't serve it with dog food–like tinned jam. Try a lovely homemade compote instead.

Take full advantage of summer’s bounty with this luscious pie that needs only 40 minutes of active prep time. Choose the ripest seasonal berries from the farmers’ market to create the gooey filling—the tartness of blackberries will perfectly mix with the sweetness of sugar and tapioca.

Fresh currants are one of summer’s overlooked treasures. They are just as adaptable to baking as other more common berries, such as blueberries and raspberries. In fact, naturally tart currants are often paired with those sweeter berries for a perfect balance of flavors. Here, red currants and raspberries are tossed together and baked in a double-crust pie liberally sprinkled with sanding sugar. It’s exactly the type of dessert you want to make—and eat—after a visit to a farmers’ market or roadside fruit stand in high summer.

Tapioca pudding is an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy of a dessert. But substitute the rich, distinctive flavor of Concord grape juice for milk in real homemade pudding, and the result is a neighborly Finger Lakes version of the classic. You’ll never look at tapioca the same way again. Eileen Farnum prepares this dish for visitors to Barrington Cellars during Keuka Wine Trail holiday events.

The local tradition of purple pies began sometime in the 1960s with Al Hodges, who commissioned Irene Bouchard to make a unique grape dessert for the Redwood Restaurant in Naples. Forty years later, thousands come to the village of Naples to celebrate the grape harvest and sample the native grape pies. The robust flavor of Concord grapes makes this unusual pie a treat. You will have to peel each grape, but the delicious results are well worth the effort.

Here is the dessert we served on opening day at Joe Beef. You can use small foil molds or teacups for serving.

The small “finger” bananas are perfect for this, because they’re denser-fleshed than regular bananas; you can find them at many supermarkets and almost all Asian and Latin markets. Regular bananas work well too, of course, but they should not be too ripe.