Making Desserts Healthier 2010-11-04

Sweet treats should yield a “nutritional punch,” says Cathy Bartko, executive chef at Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio. She’s just one of the operators who are incorporating healthier dessert options into their menus. She offers the hospital’s young patients sugar-free puddings and popsicles to satisfy their sweet tooth.

The hospital’s Web site takes her dessert philosophy a step further, providing dessert ideas and recipes for parents of children with diabetes, celiac disease and cystic fibrosis. These desserts include frozen yogurt with a variety of toppings, milkshakes, puddings and cheesecakes as well as gluten-free cookies and brownies, scones, cupcakes, individual tarts and pumpkin pies. Other popular items include banana pudding with vanilla wafers, Key lime pie, gelatins and custards.

Gluten-free baked goods are available in the cafeteria, as well.

“We also make pies, cakes and cheesecakes from our bakeshop available for sale to our employees. We’ll make biscotti for baskets for the holidays, too,” adds Bartko. “We don’t really do huge portions of desserts, just four-ounce ones. Bigger doesn’t always mean better.”

Bartko says she has a new project in the works this fall that will add a toppings station at the yogurt bar, filled with granola, fresh strawberries, blueberries and blackberries, banana chips and sugar-free syrups.

Keeping portion sizes under control is important, she says. “We don’t want to be known as ‘the diet place’ but we try to educate both our employees and our [outside] customers and give them healthier choices like low-fat yogurts and fruits. We try to make people take responsibility for themselves and their diets.”

Fruit, yes; trans fat, no: Healthy also is the mantra at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, where Lorraine Allan, assistant director for food production, quality and safety, likes to make fresh fruits visible and easily accessible by placing baskets throughout the cafeteria in an effort to promote healthy choices.

In addition, all desserts that are baked in-house—95% of all desserts sold—have been trans fat-free for several years. Patients and retail customers alike get the same cakes and pies with the only difference being the smaller portion size for patients’ cakes.

But Allan admits that dessert isn’t all about health. One of the most popular desserts is the Chocolate Delicious, a decadent chocolate cake with a cream filling, covered in a chocolate ganache.

At the 850-bed Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., Frank Coffey, director of hospitality services, likes to use as much local produce as possible at the limited kosher facility, offering patients fresh peaches, red and green grapes, papaya and watermelon. He also uses fresh berries in fruit parfaits. Sheet cakes are also popular in Kingsbrook’s retail outlets.

At Overbrook Hospital in Summit, N.J., part of Atlantic Health Care, Executive Chef Todd Daigneault makes sugar-free banana cream pies. He also likes to take a meringue and fill it with a berry compote for a gluten-free offering. Lemon blueberry tarts are a big hit as well.

“I do a lot of pies and mousses depending on what’s in season,” says Daigneault. “We do pumpkin pie in the fall, but we also do crème brulee and a brambleberry tart with blackberries and a little lemon curd, too.”

He’s been working to implement new upscale patient menus with healthier, seasonal ingredients. The beauty of fruits, he notes, is their natural sugar. For Independence Day, Daigneault grilled fruits such as carambola, honeydew melon, pineapple and figs with cilantro and honey to create a grilled fruit platter.

Smaller is big: Students at the University of New Hampshire in Durham are thinking small this year, according to Director of Dining Jon Plodzik. “Mini is big, for sure, and big isn’t as big as it used to be,” says Plodzik, who notes that cupcakes are one hot—and small—dessert item. “You can charge $2 and change for a little cupcake and people will pay for it. They want higher quality and smaller portions. We also do chocolate dipped strawberries for $1.29 each.”

In UNH dining halls, one-ounce cookies are baked all day, and Plodzik moved an oven into one dessert area for added effect. “You can smell cookies baking all day,” he explains. “The smell adds a lot of draw.”

At Lehigh Valley Health Network in eastern Pennsylvania, where Sodexo manages the foodservice, Executive Chef Todd Saylor dips pretzel rods in chocolate, then rolls them in peanuts, sprinkles or toasted coconut and packages them in cellophane bags tied with a ribbon as an impulse item at the registers. “We also started doing chocolate dipped strawberries and chocolate dipped cheesecake on a stick,” Saylor adds.

Verboten: If there is one sector where desserts, healthy or not, have taken a hit it has been schools. Desserts have all but disappeared during the battle against obesity. Jean Moseley, director of child nutrition at Coppell ISD in San Antonio, says she doesn’t do much with desserts because of the state’s school nutrition policy. Ice cream and one-ounce reduced fat cookies are the only desserts.

Introduced six years ago, the strictly enforced policy limits the number of grams of sugar and fat served each week and restricts portion sizes for items such as frozen desserts. Schools found to violate the policy can be penalized with the loss of a day of state reimbursement.