Why Atoma’s Baked Alaska Is Considered one of Seattle’s Most Revolutionary Desserts

There’s loads of ice cream on North forty fifth Avenue in Wallingford. In a couple of bustling blocks you get a Molly Moon’s, a Fainting Goat for gelato, Purple Cow for Hokkaido-style smooth serve, and Dick’s in order for you a traditional fast-food milkshake. However essentially the most fascinating ice cream on the road is on the dessert menu at Atoma, which is perhaps the one restaurant in Seattle making baked Alaskas. It’s positively the one place the place the baked Alaskas are infused with corn.

A baked Alaska is an old school dessert the place cake and ice cream are entombed in a layer of meringue, which is then charred proper earlier than it’s served so diners get a layer of heat, sugary meringue on high of chilly ice cream. The dish is normally mentioned to have originated in New York Metropolis’s famed Delmonico’s within the Eighties, however in accordance with Atlas Obscura it’s possible a lot older than that; the concept of cooking ice cream beneath a layer of one thing most likely comes from China. In any case it’s a intentionally showy, theatrical dessert that appeals to individuals who like their meals with a facet of novelty. Typically baked Alaskas are even set alight on the desk.

You don’t get the tableside fireworks at Atoma — they might most likely detract from the homespun, cozy vibe of the eating room, which is inside a transformed home. The flash comes as a substitute from the components: When Atoma opened in November 2023, for example, the baked Alaska featured parsnip ice cream, a tarragon meringue, and a carrot cake. However simply because the menu rotates with the seasons, the baked Alaska needed to change.

“As a lot as I like that parsnip Alaska that we opened with, I can’t get parsnips in the summertime,” says Atoma co-owner Johnny Courtney, who runs the kitchen. “Properly, I can, however they’re not coming from a farmer whose hand I can shake on the farmers market, you recognize?”

The dessert’s present incarnation is nicknamed the “corn Alaska,” Courtney says, and it was impressed by tres leches cake. It begins with a corn cake that’s soaked in a corn-infused milk. The ice cream is created from milk that’s smoked after which infused with corn. The ice cream units in a single day in a mould, then the group scoops out the middle of the ice cream and units the rest on high of the cake, which is frozen briefly. The middle of the ice cream is stuffed with huckleberry jam and caramel corns are studded all through. However wait, we’re not performed with the corn but: The silk from the leftover husks is charred, become a powder that’s then become sugar, and that sugar is used to make the meringue, which fits over every little thing and is cooked, then lastly dusted with the charred corn silk energy for good measure. On the very finish of this course of (which takes two or three days, Courtney says), the baked Alaska is plated with some extra huckleberry jam.

Sarah Courtney

The result’s filled with corn taste but in addition far more candy than savory, particularly while you get a type of buried-treasure caramel corn. The meringue is pleasantly smoky, and the smoky-sweetness of every little thing is reduce completely by the tartness of the jam. The truth that corn is on the middle of each component of the dessert makes it extra like a magic trick than a novelty — how did they try this?

Courtney — who got here up with the corn Alaska alongside pastry chef Nicola Willoughby — says that he’s needed to have the dessert on the menu since earlier than Atoma existed. When he labored for high-quality eating superpower Canlis through the pandemic lockdown days, he says, the group was “simply making insane desserts for workers meal simply to form of preserve busy… We made like a xmas log, we made a bananas Foster and we performed round with making a pair baked Alaskas, and we discovered that they have been actually arduous to make for 40 folks.”

It “wasn’t precisely Canlis’s vibe,” he says, however “I had that behind my thoughts — hopefully someday I can put that on the menu at my restaurant.”

At $18, it’s the most costly dessert on Atoma’s menu, but in addition the most well-liked. It’s not arduous to grasp why — it’s the form of menu merchandise that’s uncommon sufficient to draw curiosity. While you see that there’s a baked Alaska with “corn husk meringue [and] corn ice cream” don’t you simply form of must order it, simply to see what comes out?

Atoma has constructed a robust fame in lower than a yr due to dishes that, just like the baked Alaska, tweak or reinvent classics. Swedish rosette cookies are made savory with the addition of onion jam and white cheese; the XO sauce that has accompanied beef tartare and radish cake is made in home from dried geoduck. There’s a palpable quantity of care and consideration that goes into every little thing right here — what number of locations make meringue from corn silk? — however simply as importantly, there’s a way of pleasure.