Saguaro Land: How a pastry chef uses Sonoran ingredients in her desserts

Saguaro Land is a series from The Show looking at the Sonoran Desert — the lushest, hottest desert in the world that happens to be our home.

How is dessert done in the desert — specifically, the Sonoran Desert? The woman who made Chris Bianco's wedding cake, chef Tracy Dempsey, knows all about that.

Dempsey didn’t grow up in the desert — she spent her childhood all over the place — but she and husband Chuck, a meteorologist, have lived here for decades. She graduated from culinary school here in 1999, and she’s left her mark on the dessert menus of some of the best Valley restaurants.

She got her start as pastry chef at the original Mountain Shadows and Lon’s at the Hermosa Inn, two places deeply grounded — literally and figuratively — in the Sonoran Desert. She went on to work with Bernie Kantak at Cowboy Ciao, and now she freelances — and has made desserts for high-end locals from Citizen Public House to FnB.

The Show spoke with her about her culinary craft in the desert.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Here we're exploring this region we live in season by season through arts and music, food and drink, flora and fauna. And today is all about my favorite thing on that list—food, desserts to be more specific. So tell us first of all what are we going to make today?

TRACY DEMPSEY: Today we're going to make chiltepin shortbreads. So it's a little sweet baked good, a little cookie.

LAUREN GILGER: That's Tracy Dempsey, a longtime pastry chef here in the Valley. She got her start at the original Mountain Shadows and Lon's at the Hermosa Inn, two places deeply grounded in the Sonoran Desert. She went on to work with Bernie Kantak at Cowboy Ciao in Old Town Scottsdale, and now she runs a wine and pastry shop in Tempe and has made desserts for high-end locals from Citizen Public House to FNB. And often, she brings the Sonoran Desert quite literally into her baking.

TRACY DEMPSEY: Place is very important. Having—whether it's chipotle, if it's some interesting things like using mesquite beans in a dessert or in some crackers. You know, those are things that people see every day, but they might not think about consuming, and that they're actually—they're edible.

LAUREN GILGER: I met Dempsey recently in the back of her Tempe shop to make those chiltepin shortbreads and figure out how to deal with something so spicy in a dessert.

TRACY DEMPSEY: They're actually really spicy. They have quite a bite. They're about 40 times spicier or hotter than a jalapeño.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Okay, well, so how do you handle that in a baking situation where, I mean, the end product needs to be sweet?

TRACY DEMPSEY: Well, that's where sugar and fat come into play because fat always helps to neutralize a little bit of the spiciness in things. So you think about an ice cream or maybe a chocolate pot de crème that has cayenne and different chilies in it. You get the nuance of the chili, but you don't get all that heat because the fat just kind of takes the edge off, if you will.

LAUREN GILGER: Mm-hmm. Okay. All right. So let's—let's see. We have the standing mixer, lots of yummy-looking ingredients. Where do we begin?

TRACY DEMPSEY: We're going to start by creaming some butter with confectioners' sugar. And you want it to be room temperature so you get a good—you get it creamed nicely.

LAUREN GILGER: And confectioners' sugar, this is like powdered sugar, right?

TRACY DEMPSEY: Exactly, powdered sugar. Yep. And then I'm going to go ahead and pull out one of these chiltepines.

LAUREN GILGER: So they almost look like beans or like little tiny round beans.

TRACY DEMPSEY: They do. And are you getting—are you catching a whiff of them? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they're pretty—they're pretty potent.

LAUREN GILGER: You can smell that.

TRACY DEMPSEY: Yeah. I think that the Nahuatl word for them translated into flea because they're so tiny, but I also think it has to do with the bite because they are, for little tiny peppers, they are so hot. And—and the heat is really fleeting. It's really interesting because we'll make a salsa at home with it—just a little bit of vinegar and some salt and grind them up and purée it. And it's really hot and it's really pleasant to eat, but it's very fleeting, and then you're ready for more. And by the time you're done eating, you're just sweating, and you know, you feel like you've—it's been a detox situation for your whole body. You feel cleansed afterward.

LAUREN GILGER: Sounds good. So these are dried?

TRACY DEMPSEY: These are dried, yeah. And these are really—they can be challenging to find because there are ones called chile pequin, which is more—kind of the same size, but it has a point on the end, so it's almost conical. And they get a little—at the market, they might be—the name might be a little interchangeable. So you want to make sure you're really using a chiltepin. But these are very challenging to cultivate. They grow in North America, in the Southwest, and then in northern Mexico. And they require, out in the desert Southwest, they require a nurse plant so they can be protected. But I've tried growing these numerous times—bought the little tiny seeds, you know, did the—got them moist and tried to get them to germinate. Big fail. Just nothing.

LAUREN GILGER: So that's interesting. So a nurse plant, you mean like it's under a tree or under a bush or something so that it can actually grow? It's too vulnerable otherwise, essentially?

TRACY DEMPSEY: Exactly. So you notice how you see like a lot of little cacti that are growing under a nurse plant—maybe it's creosote or something of that nature that protects it. And so they need protection.

LAUREN GILGER: So what do we do with these?

TRACY DEMPSEY: So we're going to crush them up. I like to use this little chiltepinero. It's a little wooden vessel made out of ironwood, which is also from the desert. And it's a nice way to keep them from coming into too much contact with your hands. I'm a contact lens wearer, so it's really—I don't want to really have too much contact with this. But I'm going to use my left hand because I use my right hand to take out my lenses. But—

LAUREN GILGER: So even just touching them, like they're that spicy?

TRACY DEMPSEY: They are. They really are. So I'm going to put a couple into the—

LAUREN GILGER: So this is just like a tiny little like wooden vessel. It looks like—like a pepper, but I'm supposing that doesn't need to be. But a tiny little slot you're putting a few in.

TRACY DEMPSEY: Right. So it's about the same shape as the chilies themselves, right? And you can just put a couple in there and then you have this little guy to poke them and break them up and kind of grind.

LAUREN GILGER: Oh, yeah. Oh, it's like a powder.

TRACY DEMPSEY: Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: That was fast, right?

TRACY DEMPSEY: So I'm not going to use all of that. I'm going to—see the little tiny seeds?

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So you're kind of tapping the—the powder into the powdered sugar and butter mix.

TRACY DEMPSEY: Right. Okay. So I'm going to put that on the mixer. And since my butter is nicely at room temperature, it's going to cream pretty quickly.

LAUREN GILGER: So tell me, I mean, you've been cooking or baking, I should say, in Arizona for a very long time and had worked at some of the best restaurants here, some restaurants that are really rooted in the Sonoran Desert. What does that mean to you, like to try to use those ingredients? When did you start experimenting with this kind of stuff?

TRACY DEMPSEY: I think it was actually probably back when I was working at Lon's, trying to use a little bit more of our native ingredient. And it wasn't until I was at Cowboy Ciao that it was really—that it just really had a place there. And it was really important to incorporate not just our native ingredient, but also our local ingredients. I know we had like a Mexican chocolate pot de crème that Chef Bernie Kantak had started and then I took it over and tweaked it a little bit and used a little bit more like ancho chili and brought things, you know, different, more specific chilies into it. I think it's important because when we're local independent restaurants, for example, or even a local independent bakery wine shop like we are, it's important to tap into your community and tap into what's local, what represents our—you know, where we are.

LAUREN GILGER: And there tends to be a lot of edible ingredients in the desert, like literally in, you know, a mesquite tree growing on the side of the road, or if you go to a park or a preserve, you're going to find a lot of these ingredients just literally on the ground.

TRACY DEMPSEY: It's—it's true. And everybody's raking them up or blowing them into the street, I know. It's—and that's—I think that's where there's that disconnect. It's like it's just, you know, the flora and the fauna around us. And it's like, no, it's really—this is stuff people eat. And a lot of it's really good for you, like mesquite flour. It's really great. You know, people would eat the actual beans inside. We've roasted them and ground them up to use in ice cream, but they are also—they were used as a coffee replacement. So you would roast them and then grind them like coffee, and they have almost that same thing that in Louisiana I remember my great-grandparents drinking, the chicory coffee. And it has that malty—but it's a great coffee replacement, but it doesn't have the caffeine. So many things around us that are just—I think we assume that things are toxic, everything. And they're not.

TRACY DEMPSEY: Yeah, it's always what we're told, right? Don't eat that. Don't eat that. You know, that was on the ground. Don't eat that. You don't know what that is. But a lot of our plants here are indeed very edible and have multiple uses.

LAUREN GILGER: There's something ironic in that since it's a desert that seems very standoffish in some ways, right?

TRACY DEMPSEY: It sure is. I know. We think it's, you know, people assume that the desert is—like it's not alive. We forget how living and full of life it is. I mean, I think anybody who doubts that can go out after a rain and see the cactus doing their thing because that's their opportunity. You have so many little berries, like there's the shrubs with the little barberries that you can find at some of the Middle Eastern markets here.

So we have our butter and powdered sugar creamed. To this, we're going to add a little bit of crunchy sea salt.

LAUREN GILGER: Flour going in now?

TRACY DEMPSEY: Flour going in. And that's all there is to this?

It's just butter, sugar, flour, and whatever you want to add as a flavoring. In this case, we're adding the chiltepin. Yep.

TRACY DEMPSEY: Now we can go ahead—

LAUREN GILGER: Oh, this looks like beautiful dough now we've got here, yeah. Tracy Dempsey, thank you so much.

TRACY DEMPSEY: My pleasure. Thank you.