Why Diana Yen’s Strawberry Rose Smoothie is Genius

Each week in Genius Recipes—usually along with your assist!—Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that may change the best way you prepare dinner.

When Diana Yen and I acquired matched as much as create an merchandise for the snack break at Cherry Bombe Jubilee, Diana wished one thing playful, one thing visible. Because the founding father of A LA CARTE, a studio that makes a speciality of meals images, styling, and recipe growth, Yen is all the time specializing in find out how to make particular person substances sing. She lives in Ojai, California (which she’s dubbed “the Upstate of L.A.”) and visits the farmers market weekly, letting native and seasonal produce information her cooking. In her work, substances come first, maintaining in thoughts the only technique to execute. Often a recipe is finished as soon as after which by no means used once more.

I, however, am the founding father of Anita’s Yogurt primarily based in Brooklyn, NY. I’m a former vegan chef, and I created my signature coconut yogurt in her house kitchen to make use of in dessert recipes. 9 years later, the model has bought over 1,000,000 cups of yogurt from coast-to-coast together with 150 areas of Entire Meals. My recipes have been featured on Food52, Munchies, Cherry Bombe and Bon Appétit.

So collectively, Diana wished to make one thing utilizing Anita’s Yogurt that evoked the journal’s emblem. So she thought, “How do I make two cherries?” She sliced strawberries horizontally and that led to drawing a stem between them. An enormous a part of what made it fashionable was drawing that stem on the surface of the cups, and sticking the strawberries on the within. It was colourful and the flavors evoked springtime—a floral trace from rosewater and the tart strawberries. The smoothie had three layers, crimson strawberry puree on the underside, white chia and yogurt within the center, and a basic pink strawberry smoothie on high. It’s a technicolor dream of a smoothie, a pousse-cafe meets a parfait meets a smoothie, as scrumptious because it was visually beautiful.

Most spectacular to me was how she showcased my yogurt so superbly, and the engineering that was concerned. Every layer needed to be barely much less thick than the earlier one to ensure that them to remain on high of one another with out mushing collectively. With our staff of 5, we fastidiously spooned every layer into tons of of glasses (every one hand drawn with the stem by Diana) the morning of Jubilee. Diana hand minimize tons of of paper straws in order that they have been the right size for the mini tumblers. As soon as the snack break began, attendees poured into the room and the smoothies have been gone inside minutes. However our efforts paid off. Diana’s strawberry rose smoothing made with my yogurt turned essentially the most instagrammed snack of that 12 months’s occasion.

I am an ex-economist, lifelong-Californian who moved to New York to work in meals media in 2007, earlier than returning to the land of Dutch Crunch bread and tri-tip barbecues in 2020. Dodgy profession decisions apart, I can not assist however apply the rational tendencies of my former life to issues like: recipe tweaking, digging up obscure info about pizza, and deciding what number of pastries to place in my purse for “later.”