No-Bake Summer

There is a particular dignity to a dessert that refuses heat. In the high months, when the kitchen surrenders to the air outside it, the most generous thing a cook can offer is something already cold. This issue gathers twelve of them: not a definitive list, but a set of postcards from places where summer has long been a problem to be eaten through.

We sorted by technique rather than by sugar. Some of these desserts gel — they hold themselves together through agar, gelatin, or the slow tightening of starch. Others freeze — they trap air in an ice that stays soft enough to spoon. A few simply layer, refrigerated until the seams blur. Each strategy makes a different kind of cold: the wobble of panna cotta is not the shatter of granita, and the chew of mochi has nothing in common with the hush of frozen yogurt bark.

We were also looking for a wide map. A Korean shaved-ice mountain stands next to an Italian half-frozen loaf; a Mexican rice drink that thickens into pudding shares a page with an Australian agar jelly cut into cubes. None of these traditions speaks for an entire summer, but together they sketch what a global cold-dessert canon might look like in 2026 — provisional, plural, and largely unbothered by the patisserie.

A walk through the issue:

• Pavlova — A meringue base baked low and slow, then loaded cold with cream and stone fruit. The only oven moment is the shell.
• Mochi — Glutinous rice pounded into a cool, elastic skin around bean paste or ice cream.
• Bingsu — A Korean mountain of milk-shaved ice with red bean, fruit, or matcha; the spoon goes through it like snow.
• Panna cotta — Italian cream set with a whisper of gelatin, served with whatever fruit the season hands you.
• Granita — A Sicilian ice scraped with a fork until it becomes weather.
• Horchata — A rice-and-cinnamon drink that, chilled hard, edges into pudding territory.
• Rocky road — A refrigerator slab of chocolate, marshmallow, and nuts; a stovetop melt, then patience.
• Semifreddo — Half-frozen, fully airy; an Italian compromise between mousse and ice cream.
• Coconut pudding — Coconut cream set with agar or starch, the cleanest expression of tropical sweetness.
• Agar jelly — Cubes of fruit-flavored jelly that hold their edges in the heat better than gelatin does.
• Icebox cake — Cookies softened by cream overnight until the layers read as a single sponge.
• Frozen yogurt bark — A modern, Instagrammable freeze: yogurt poured thin, jeweled with fruit, cracked into shards.

Read in any order. The issue is built to be opened with one hand while the other holds something that is melting.