Sweet, Salty, and Vegan
Plant-based pastry techniques at HAGS that are good enough to satisfy the skeptics
Lemon Poppy Seed Cake, Limoncello-Tomato Water Soak, Vegan Mascarpone, Tomato-Basil Jam, Basil-Lemon Powder | Photos: Alexander Zeren
The cheese course at HAGS, an intimate, tasting menu restaurant in New York’s East Village, is unlike your typical cheese course at a fine dining restaurant. That’s because it’s entirely vegan.
This was an intentional choice by Chef-Co-Owner Telly Justice and her Chef de Cuisine Lars Varley, who also runs the small but mighty pastry kitchen. HAGS itself is not strictly vegan, but the cheese course always is. “That’s me being cheeky,” says Varley.
In addition to their duties as chef de cuisine, Varley, who is vegan themselves, oversees a rotating, three-course plant-based dessert tasting menu at HAGS, which guests can add on to the end of their meal or walk in and order toward the end of service. The experience offers a glimpse into Varley’s culinary style: inventive and complex while still hitting every note of nostalgia.
The cheese course this past fall was a fermented almond milk pimento cheese paired with a barley malt-glazed soft pretzel. “I love the freedom with the cheese course. I have a background in bread, so I like to fit it in wherever I can.” Not wanting to “stray too far” from the original, crowd-pleasing treat, Varley uses a barley malt syrup to feed the yeast that is also used to glaze the finished pretzel. They typically lean on store-bought Violife butter for “baked items where consistency is important," but for the barley pretzel, Varley decided on a combination of coconut oil and sunflower lecithin. For the cheese, Varley ferments a house-made almond milk overnight before folding in turmeric-pickled ají dulce chiles and smoked Jimmy Nardello peppers.
Barley Malt Soft Pretzel, Fermented Almond-Pimento “Cheese,” Turmeric Vinegar-Pickled Ají Dulce Peppers, Smoked Jimmy Nardellos, Pickled Mustard Seeds, Piparra Peppers, Nasturtium
Pastry Chef LArs Varley
For the second course, Varley sent out a poppy seed-studded cake with plant-based mascarpone and a tomato-basil jam, contrasting sweet and vegetal flavors. “My favorite thing is bridging salt and sweet,” they say. The mascarpone is made from Violife cream, which acts as a close 1:1 substitute for heavy cream. Adding agar agar transforms the vegan cream into a “loose-curded ricotta,” which Varley then amps up and stabilizes by incorporating sugar and fermented coconut yogurt to “bridge it into a mascarpone.”
In pastry, there is a careful dance between playing to a diner’s memories and pushing them toward something less familiar. “The most successful dessert incorporates both,” Varley says.
The final course of the fall tasting menu at HAGS was a sticky toffee pudding, which brings to mind a fluffy date cake and caramelized toffee sauce. Varley stays true to the dessert while toeing the line with a salt and pepper potato ice cream. The first attempts at developing the ice cream were unsuccessful according to Varley. “The ice cream was tricky; it completely broke in the machine.” After trial and error, they decided to steep roasted potatoes into an ice cream base, strain it, and blend the base with a quarter of the potatoes, “otherwise it’s way too much starch.” Finally, they brush golden sesame oil over the cake to enhance the umami, which usually “gets lost when you don’t have brown butter,” they explain.
Since graduating from the Natural Gourmet Institute, Varley has amassed a repertoire of techniques with which to create plant-based desserts that can disarm even the biggest skeptics. “Vegan pastry gets a bad name,” they say. But ingredients like fat-rich coconut oil and soy milk, which emulsify like a dream, are staples in their kitchen, as are flax seeds—which work like aquafaba when soaked—and commercial vegan butters. Things like pastry crust are actually “an easy thing to replicate,” says Varley, “because it’s [just] fat and flour.”
