2007/03/18
UPDATE (20080413): This recipe is still okay for the first day or two, but I now use better methods to keep ice creams and sorbets from turning icy. I recommend using a small quantity of a commercial stabilizer like Cremodan 30, and/or invert sugar (trimoline), glucose, corn syrup, honey, or some other glucose-heavy sweet product. It will help the ice cream or sorbet turn out much more smooth, without imparting too sweet of a flavor.
Sorbet is a delicious, refreshing, and palate-cleansing treat. But homemade sorbets always seem to be icy and hard, instead of creamy and smooth like those from high-end restaurants and high-end brands. I like my sorbets tart enough to cut through whatever I've just eaten, but sweet enough to be yummy. And after doing my research, it turns out that sugar is the key to having a good texture. Sugar dissolves into the excess water, turning it to syrup. That means no excess water to turn into big ice crystals.
The recipe below gives great texture, but it retains plenty tartness to be refreshing. And, if you don't have an ice cream maker, you can still make it (although it won't be as good). Just pour the mix into a baking pan and put it in the freezer. Every fifteen minutes, take the pan out and "churn" the mix as well as you can. The idea is that you're trying to incorporate air into it as it freezes, which is what an ice cream maker does.
Mango Sorbet
Makes enough for about 8 to 10 sizeable servings. Prep time: 15 minutes. Cooling time: overnight. Freezing time: 25 minutes. Hardening time: 2 hours.The ingredients:
- 2 ripe mangos
- 1/2 cup sugar + 2 tsp
- about 4 tsp lemon juice
- 2 tsp vodka (normal or lemon-flavored)
Special equipment:
- Ice cream maker
The algorithm:
Peel the mangos and then dice the flesh, being careful with the pit. Scrape the faces of the pit to remove as much of the pulp as possible, but don't scrape the edges of the pit since what sticks on there is tough, stringy, and mostly flavorless.
Add mango flesh to blender, along with 1/4 cup of water. Puree until smooth, about a minute. Pour mango puree into medium-sized bowl.
In order to have a creamy texture, instead of the icy mix that often turns out from homemade sorbets, you need to have a high sugar content, but it shouldn't be so high as to be cloying. 1/2 cup plus 2 tsp sugar seems to work well for 2 mangos, and the sweetness gets balanced a bit by the tartness of the lemon that you'll be adding. You can add more sugar if you like, as it will only improve the texture (at the risk of making the sorbet too sweet). Add all the sugar, as well as the vodka (use flavorless, or lemon-flavored). Adding a high-proof liquor also helps the texture, since the alcohol has far too high a freezing point to freeze. It keeps the sorbet creamy and scoopable, and gives better mouth feel.
After adding sugar and vodka, add about 4 tsp lemon juice (between 1/2 lemon and a whole lemon). Stir mix. You don't need to heat the mixture, the sugar will dissolve at room temperature. If the sugar doesn't dissolve after a minute or so of stirring, stop, let the mix sit for a while, and come back to it and stir again.
Once all the sugar is dissolved, put the bowl in the refrigerator. The mixture needs to get down below 40 degrees Fahrenheit before you use your ice cream maker. You can use a thermometer to test the temperature, or you can just leave it in the refrigerator overnight and it will definitely be cold enough in the morning. If you need it to cool faster, use a metal bowl for the mixture, and place it in the refrigerator, in a larger bowl of ice water. Water has great thermal conductivity, and cold water will cool the mixture very rapidly.
Once the mixture is down below 40 degrees, take out your ice cream maker, get it running, and add the mixture to it all at once. If you have an especially small and/or wussy ice cream maker, you may have to do it in two batches in order for it to freeze the mixture quickly enough not to form large ice crystals. The slower something freezes, the larger the ice crystals it will form. You want your sorbets (and ice creams) to freeze as rapidly as possible so that the ice crystals are tiny, resulting in a nice, creamy texture. That's why you cool the mixture before putting in the ice cream maker, instead of just putting it in immediately after the sugar is dissolved; pre-cooling makes the mixture freeze much more quickly, yielding better texture.
After twenty-five minutes or so, the sorbet will be properly aerated and frozen. It will still be quite soft at this point, so if you want it harder (and you probably do), take it out of the ice cream maker with a rubber spatula, and put it into some sort of bowl or tupperware that has a lid. I use normal tupperware. Before putting on the lid, tear off a piece of saran wrap larger than the container you're using, and cover the sorbet with the saran wrap, pressing the saran wrap down directly onto the surface of the sorbet. This step prevents a hard crust from forming on the surface of the sorbet, so, ideally, you don't want any of the surface area of the sorbet exposed to air. Ideally, it will all be touching either tupperware or saran wrap. Finally, put the lid on the tupperware. It's fine if some of the saran wrap hangs out.
After two or three hours, the sorbet will be hardened to the proper consistency. You should remove it from the freezer a few minutes before scooping, always returning the saran wrap to its surface when you're done, and pressing it down as much as possible.
Posted by Barzelay on 2007/03/18 @ 23:50 | Comments (0) | EatFoo 1.0 Posts