Tuesday, February 24, 2009

CSA week 11 - White tea/carambola/ginger sorbet

This is a simple sorbet so there's not much to the recipe. I brewed up two cups of strong white tea, mixed in 3/4 cup sugar, chopped and de-seeded one large carambola, grated a teaspoon of fresh ginger with my microplane, put it all in the blender with a Tablespoon of light rum and blended it smooth. Chilled, churned and ripened and here it is:









It's frozen a bit too solidly so it's crumbly, a little hard to scoop. The texture's a bit more Italian ice than a proper sorbet. I should have added more rum.

And the flavor is a bit too sweet--this would have worked better with a tart carambola--but I like the flavor. The fruit, the tea and the spice have merged into something new and unique but naggingly familiar too. It's somewhere in the root beer/cola neighborhood. That's it--it tastes like the root beer flavor of Bottle Caps candy. I think that's a vague resemblance plus the extra sweetness taking it into candy territory.

Mark Bittman has a recipe for broiling cornish hens with a glaze made of powdered red hots, which he created as a take off of Jean-Georges Vongerichten's squab with Jordan almonds. I'll bet poultry coated with ground root beer or cola Bottle Caps would work too. People do cook chicken in cola I'm told. I'm putting this on my to-do list. Not anywhere near the top of my to-do list, but it's going on there somewhere.

2 comments:

kat said...

& isn't ham often cooked with cola or Dr. Pepper

billjac said...

Yeah, that's true. If there's any sorbet left after a week I think I'll melt it down and poach some meat in it just to see what happens.