Former pastry chef has ice cream down cold

A Passion for Ice Cream, By Emily Luchetti, Chronicle, 224 pp., $35

With five dessert books, each more friendly to a home cook's sweet tooth than the last, Emily Luchetti is one of the stars in the American pastry firmament. So it's ample cause for celebration that Luchetti has turned her talents to ice cream.

Pastry chefs tend to be victims of their own specialized skills when it comes to cookbooks. Years spent honing their craft -- callusing their fingertips to test boiling sugar, tempering chocolate within a 10th of a degree, coaxing fragile egg-based emulsions into quivering solid form -- mean that your typical pastry chef has long forgotten what it's like to struggle over a simple pie crust that just won't roll into a circle.

What Luchetti, former pastry chef at San Francisco's Stars restaurant, does better than most is translate her carbohydrate wizardry into something recognizable in the home kitchen. While even her ice cream recipes may require a few more steps than the good country desserts this nation was built on (buckles, cobblers, slumps, and pies), they're well-thought out and readily achievable. No battery of specialized equipment is required. Just an ice cream machine. Who would have thought that the frozen treat most of us lick from a sugar cone could have so many thrilling avatars?

Luchetti's last book, ``A Passion for Desserts," established strong clear flavors organized around two or three dominant notes, and ``A Passion for Ice Cream" is no different. Lime ice cream with blueberries and sugared mint leaves instantly lit up the brain's sweet and tart pleasure centers like a pinball machine, going a step beyond what Luchetti describes as the more traditional pairing of lemon and blueberries. Oat financiers with peach ice cream combined the chewy texture and almondy scent of traditional financiers with the heady summer fragrance of peaches.

Papaya milkshakes -- nothing more than ripe papayas whizzed in a food processor with rich vanilla ice cream -- were so delicious that slurpy straw sounds could be heard around our table long after the glasses had technically been emptied. I tried the butter crunch ice cream as well, without the cherries jubilee Luchetti recommends. Adding butter amendments to the dairy bomb that is true ice cream has an over-the-top grandeur I can't resist. This version was gratifyingly, searingly sweet, but not so much so that you couldn't taste the toasted and pulverized walnut brittle scattered throughout.

Best of all was Luchetti's frozen Key Lime pie with crushed sugar cone crust and macadamia nut cream, a decadent masterpiece that was surprisingly easy to assemble. The crust was simply ground-up cones held together with a little butter. The citrus curd had just the right velvety balance of smoothness and firmness, and was so tasty that many spoonfuls had to be sacrificed even before it headed to the freezer. And the macadamia cream, a flagrant act of lily-gilding, had us rolling our eyes with pleasure and throwing caution to the wind for seconds.

The cool artistry in this volume is a powerful argument for emptying out your freezer (are you really ever going to make stock with those lamb bones?) and filling it with homemade ice cream.

While most summer-fruit desserts leave you reeling at the mere thought of sticky butter doughs and a hot oven, these treats won't make anyone break a sweat. At this rate, we'll be begging for a heat wave.