On A Sorbet Kick

I’ve been on a sorbet kick lately.  In college I worked at Jamba Juice and some of their smoothies call for sorbet.  The sorbet they use isn’t flavored but I really like the texture so I would frequently substitute it for sherbet when I made myself smoothies at work.  Sorbet sounded really appealing one night a couple of weeks ago so I rummaged around to see what I had on hand to work with.  I had pureed and frozen some mangoes for Wingnut’s baby food but he’s moving away from the pureed baby food these days so I thawed them all out to use for sorbet instead.  It didn’t seem like quite enough fruit so I found a forgotten bag of peaches in the freezer, too, and thawed them as well, then pureed them in the food processor.  I made a 1:1 simple syrup, grated some lemon zest and squeezed a little juice, mixed it with the fruit, thew it all in the ice cream maker and had a very tasty late-night treat.  The texture was a little funny because I’d ground everything in the food processor and it wasn’t quite fine enough to pass for what I consider sorbet to be and I wanted another yummy treat (the mango-peach goodness didn’t last long) so I decided to try again.

Grapefruit is in season right now and is on sale everywhere.  It also happens to be one of my favorite flavors ever so I bought a bunch while grocery shopping.  I zested some of the grapefruit, juiced a bunch of them, again added some simple syrup, and put it in the ice cream maker.  I thought about adding some mint but didn’t have any on hand so I added a couple of drops of peppermint extract.  The extract added a little bit of a funny taste – probably too much alcohol taste – but a couple of days after freezing that taste went away and the grapefruit sorbet is my favorite ever.

A market had some honeydew that looked ripe and yummy so I grabbed one, cut it up, and threw it in the blender to puree it this time.  The blender worked much better than the food processor since it makes a smoother puree.  This time I added some lime zest and juice to the fruit and simple syrup mixture because I like lime with honeydew melon.  It was perfect.  I was kind of dumb, though, and hadn’t let my freezer bowl freeze long enough after the grapefruit sorbet so it didn’t freeze the sorbet mixture as well as it should have.  No matter.  I dumped it into a tupperware, put it in the freezer, and scraped it out with a fork to enjoy it.  Not as easy to serve up but it still tasted good.

Then, the other day, I was talking to Lady of Perpetual Chaos.  She wasn’t feeling well so I offered to take dinner to her.  With ODD working late all the time I haven’t been as vigilant about making dinner since it’s just Peanut and me and Peanut would eat a PB and honey sandwich for every meal if I let her.  So I made dinner and thought I’d throw a pear sorbet together to go with it.  I was in the middle of making dinner when I started the sorbet so I wasn’t really paying attention when I put my machine together.  Every time I looked into the bowl the sorbet wasn’t looking quite right.  I stuck in a spoon to see what the deal was and the center was still slightly warm from the simple syrup.  I poked at the edges and they were frozen hard.  The other thing I thought was weird was the paddle moving around and around knocking my spoon as I poked around.  I hadn’t remembered it doing that before.  It was then I realized I must have put the paddle in funny or something because the paddle was turning with the bowl so it wasn’t mixing the puree around at all as it froze.  Oops.  I took the machine apart, and used a spoon to scrape the sides.  At one point I was holding the spoon at a funny angle, it caught on a particularly frozen bit, then plopped into the still runny puree splashing some of it out of the bowl, all over the counter, all over my shirt, and all over my face.  It was awesome.  Peanut thought it was hilarious.  Anyway, most of it stayed in the bowl so I was able to finish (carefully) scraping then I put the machine back together and got it working correctly.  The finished sorbet was fine.  Not my favorite but still pretty good.  I think it was a little too thick for my taste and I would maybe strain it next time, but it still tasted yummy and I still felt okay sharing it with a friend.

Next up, at Fuffy’s suggestion, I’m going to try an orange ginger combination.  Whether it works or not I also have more grapefruit sitting on my counter waiting to be made into more grapefruit sorbet and I can’t hardly wait!