I’m busy planning a long weekend in New York, and one of my many destinations is going to be Momofuku bakery, home of the infamous “crack pie.” What’s crack pie? Foodies say it’s the best thing to happen to food since food. I’ll let you know. However, thinking about crack pie put me in mind of Minneapolis’ own homegrown pastry crack, the crackeroon.
Never had one? Then run—don’t walk!—to the Salty Tart. The Salty Tart is the bakery of Michelle Gayer, the famous pastry chef who worked with Charlie Trotter and co-wrote the Charlie Trotter dessert cookbook before coming to our fair burg and taking the pastry position at La Belle Vie and Solera. Some might call the crackeroon a simple macaroon—but they’d be wrong. There’s something so haunting and complex, so sweet and comforting, so plain and complicated about Gayer Nicholson’s macaroons that you can’t have just one, so her friends started calling them crackeroons. And here we are.
I called up Michelle Gayer for a crackeroon update and learned: Behold! They will be at the Minnesota State Fair this year. Gayer told me that her Midtown Global Market neighbor, JJ’s Produce Exchange, has a booth “selling big-as-your-head Colorado peaches, right outside the Ag building, and I’m going to make mini ones to sell. I don’t know what they’re going to cost yet.” Regular mac- er, crackeroons cost $1.50 each, “but I think we’re going to do mini ones and sell so-many in a snow cone.”
Awesome.
Also, anyone looking to win the National Night Out impress the neighbors sweepstakes is advised that while crackeroons come in only one flavor, real bean vanilla, catering trays can be ordered in which discs of chocolate are placed on hot crackeroons as they emerge from the oven, creating the rarest of all addictive delicacies, the chocolate crackeroon.
The Salty Tart
www.saltytart.com
920 E Lake St, Minneapolis
612-874-9206
