Pastry chef’s pine nut cookies a real treat

Classically trained Brian Levy uses no added sugars.

I only recently got to know Brian Levy, yet he is already my hero. A classically trained pastry chef, Levy wrote a cookbook that brims with tempting baked goods without using any added sugar — no white, brown, raw or coconut sugars — not even a drop of molasses, honey or maple syrup.

Instead, he infuses his desserts with inherently sweet whole-food ingredients, mainly fresh and dried fruits. Yes, fruit contains sugars, which are concentrated when the fruit is dried, but because that sugar is “packaged” by nature with fiber, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, using fruit in its unrefined form is a more nutritious way to achieve a sweet taste, with a gentler effect on blood sugar.

I know firsthand how challenging it can be to create fruit-sweetened recipes, which is why I award Levy the hero’s cape. You have to abandon the time-tested formulas for the usual baked goods and basically start from scratch, testing and retesting recipes to get the texture and flavor just right. He clearly did the work, because every recipe I tried in his book, “Good & Sweet: A New Way to Bake with Naturally Sweet Ingredients,” worked seamlessly.

These easy-to-make treats are proof. Made with almond flour, and sweetened with a combination of dates, apricots and raisins, they are chewy and delicately sweet, with a crunchy, buttery coating of toasted pine nuts. Levy calls them cookies, as they are inspired by his favorite Italian pignoli cookies from then legendary Manhattan bakery Veniero’s, but to me, because they are so subtly sweet and fruit-flavored, they read more like an extra-special “energy bite.”

For more on baking without added sugar, listen to my interview with Brian Levy on my podcast One Real Good Thing.

Recipe adapted by cookbook author and registered dietitian nutritionist Ellie Krieger from “Good & Sweet,”by Brian Levy (Avery, 2022).