CSA week two overflow - black sapote colada sherbet

On second thought, maybe those sapotes are ready to be used after all.

As I mentioned a week ago, my plan for any tropical fruit we get this year is to substitute it into my unexpectedly fabulous piña colada sherbet recipe for either the bananas or the pineapple depending on the texture and see how it turns out. Last July I subbed in mango for the bananas which worked quite well but I haven't gotten back to the idea until now.

I'm taking out the bananas again this time which gives me some concern over texture as bananas are rather special in that regard. But if anything can replace that thick fat-mimicking creaminess is sapote. That makes my ingredient list:
1 large and 1 small black sapote
1 1/2 cups fresh pineapple
2 Tablespoons or so pineapple juice from the container I was keeping the pineapple pieces in
1 cup thick coconut milk
1/2 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon light rum
and
1 Tablespoon dutch process cocoa

The challenge each time I do this is picking the complementary flavors that will bring out the flavor of the guest fruit. In the original I used lime juice and hot sauce. For the mango, lime juice again along with ginger, cinnamon and allspice. This time the obvious choice is to nix the lime and add cocoa. I'll have to do some research to figure out the best choices when canistels and caiminos come along.

No cooking required here so I just tossed everything into the blender and let it spin. The result is, texturally and visually, indistinguishable from chocolate pudding and not far off in flavor either. An ice cream churn is entirely optional; you could serve this as is.




You could, anyway; I've got a bad churining habit to maintain. So I let the mixture cool for eight hours in the back of the fridge and then gave it a turn in the ice cream machine. After 25 minutes it wasn't really solidifying but it was getting lumpy and the bucket was running out of freeze so decided that was good enough and I put it into the freezer to ripen.

And the next day I scooped some out and gave it a try:

It has the mouth feel of premium ice cream without a hint of ice crystals, gumminess, insta-melt or the other ills sherbet is prone to proving again that bananas aren't as special as Alton Brown makes them out to be.

The flavors are muted at freezer temperatures but a couple minutes of warming brings them out intensely with not-quite-chocolate and pineapple at the front fading to a lingering not-quite-chocolate/coconut. The cocoa did a good job highlighting the chocolate-esque notes in the black sapote but it's still clearly cocoa plus tropical fruits. It's an interestingly unusual but quite pleasant combination. Actually, around here it's not so unusual; all the local confectioners use tropical fruits in their chocolates. It is unusual that I like it though. Let's see what my co-workers think.

Coconut cream sherbet

This is a recipe that evolved as it went along rather than being planned from the start so I'll try to take you through the process.

Honestly, I'm surprised it took me as long as it did to come up with "ice cream" as the answer to the question "what am I going to do with the substandard coconut milk and hard to utilize coconut water in my refrigerator?". When it did, my first thought was to go with a simple sorbet: just add the water to the milk, mix in some sugar and dump it in the churn. But the coconut milk was really too mild, even punched up by the coconut water, and, after the punching up, a bit thin.

So I tossed idea of that pure raw drinking-coconut flavor and decided to cook the mixture down. I started with 2 1/4 cups of coconut milk, 1 1/2 cups coconut water and added 3/4 cup sugar. I have this idea in my head that if you boil coconut milk long enough it will caramelize and turn brown the way toasted coconut does. I know that seems improbable, but I remember doing it once even if I can't find the recipe or any mention of such a thing on-line and I remember plenty of recipes I've made where it didn't happen. Anyway, after 20 minutes of it not happening this time too, I figured that was enough and gave up. By that time I had cooked the mixture down to 3 cups even and it was a little thickened up. I added a couple Tablespoons of rum, a squeeze of lime and the zest from that lime wedge and gave it a taste. It was a nice cooked coconut flavor intense enough that I figured I could add a bit of dairy to help the texture without compromising the flavor unduly. So in went a half cup of half-and-half. Now it was tasting rather like coconut cream pie which got me thinking about mix-ins.

Bits of pie crust would, of course, be ideal, but I've been avoiding making pie crust for years and I'm not going to stop now. And supermarket pre-made crusts aren't likely to suit. On the other hand streusel topping's not a bad idea and I keep a little baggie of it pre-made in my pantry for desert emergencies. (Slice up a piece of fruit into an ovenproof bowl, add a bit of jam or juice, toss with a teaspoon of corn starch, cut the streusel mix with butter, sprinkle on top and bake at 350 until golden brown on top and bubbly underneath.) It's been there a while so I don't recall exactly what I put in it. Just flour, sugar, rolled oats and cinammon I think. No idea of ratios.

While the sherbet mix was in the churn, I baked maybe a half cup of streusel (cut with butter, of course) in my toaster oven. I know it looks burnt, but it's not. That burning smell is because I don't clean my crumb tray often enough. OK, maybe it's a little burnt but it's still in the I-can-pretend-I-did-that-on-purpose stage where the burnt flavor is interesting not nasty. I put it in the freezer to cool off while the churning finished and then stirred it in.

And here's the pretty-cool-looking final result:
Disappointingly, the bold coconut flavor of the warm mix and even right out of the churn has faded in the final ripened sherbet. It hasn't faded away entirely, but it's become subtle which moves the streusel a bit more to the forefront that I really wanted. It's not at all bad mind you, but doesn't wow the way I was hoping. The streusel is toasty, spicy and buttery as it should be, but without strong fruit to play against it comes on a bit strong. The texture is a bit crumbly, as sherbets tend to be, but it melts smoothly on the tongue and the streusel bits are still crisp and chewy the way they should be. Given how well it held up, I'm surprised streusel isn't a common ice cream mix in. It's certainly going to be complementing plenty of my fruit-based ice creams in the future.

CSA - Tastes like soap

Really fancy soap, sure, but still not what I was hoping for. I'm talking about my latest sherbet here and looking at the ingredients I really shouldn't be surprised: avocado, lemon, honey, lavender and thyme. But avocado ice cream isn't all that unusual (as unusual ice creams go) and it's usually paired with lemon. Honey--avocado honey from a previous CSA delivery--is a natural addition. It's where I started getting creative with the flavorings that things went wrong. I'm not going to say lavender and thyme were bad ideas; both go well with the other flavors involved here and straight out of the blender the sherbet base had a lovely rich, sweet and slowly blooming herbal mix of flavors. The problem only came after churning; the low temperatures damped all the flavors down except the lavender. That actually seems to have intensified into a nasty astringent long-lingering chemical tang. So, a teaspoon of lavender extract is way too much. So noted.

On the other hand, the texture is as smooth and creamy as you might ask for, albeit recognizably with the particular smoothness of avocado, the color is lovely (you'll have to trust me on that one. My phone-camera's white balance can't capture the reality of its pale green) and, like I said before, the flavors work if I can get the balance right. I'm going to try this again when some avocados show up in the CSA and I'll give a proper recipe then.

Mango colada sherbet

After my (entirely incidentally low-fat, low-calorie and vegan) piña colada sherbet surpassed expectations so spectacularly a couple weeks ago I've been eager to try some variations both because they'll probably taste really good and to figure out exactly what I did right.

This week, with the bounty of mangoes from both festivals and backyards, the variation to try was obvious. I could have just switched out the bananas, but I decided to increase the amount of mango. I wanted the mangoes to be predominant and also I was using freezer-burnt pre-packed pineapple chunks instead of the really nice fresh pineapple I had last time so best if they don't stand out too much. Also, I changed up the fiddly bits to match the new flavors. As I'm newly educated as to mango varieties I gave the sort to use a bit of thought. I wanted something with a bit of fiber to help the sherbet thicken, sweet so I can use less sugar and with a bold flavor as the cold tends to tone things down. But after all that thought I remembered that I didn't actually have a lot of options and I used the mangoes a co-worker brought in. Close enough.


Here's what I came up with:

1 1/2 cups chopped mango (extra-ripe mushy bits are fine. It's all going into the blender)
1 cup chopped pineapple
1 cup coconut milk
1/2 cup sugar (or 1/4 cup Splenda blend)
juice from 1/2 lime
2 Tablespoons light rum
1 pinch salt
1 dash dried ginger powder (or equivalent in ground fresh ginger. I have a dried ginger root that I grated using a microplane.)
1 dash cinnamon (fresh grated again is better)
1 dash allspice (you could probably use a spice grinder on dried allspice berries if you wanted. I haven't tried it so I don't know if it makes much of a difference.)

Put it all in a blender. Blend smooth. Chill to 40 degrees F. Churn and ripen.

I also chopped a frozen banana into 1/2 inch cubes and mixed it in as I removed the sherbet from the churn, but that's optional.


The results are about as good as the original piña colada, which is to say very good indeed. Each bite starts with pineapple, fades into mango and lingers with the richness of the spices unless you get a bite with banana which takes over as the mango fades and gives a nice chew to contrast with the creamy melt-away smoothness of the sherbet. This would work perfectly in bellinis with a particularly dry champagne. The sweetness of the sherbet isn't cloying but it lingers and it could use something to cut through. Failing the champagne, a cup of coffee isn't a bad idea.

So it looks like the bananas weren't necessary to the texture of the sherbet. I'll have to compare coconut milk and milk milk to see how much difference that substitution makes both to texture and to healthiness. Coconut oil is just about the least healthy fat out there and while I don't think it's made from the same bits coconut milk is I can't imagine the fat in coconut milk is any better. Luckily there's not a heck of a lot of it in one cup. Substituting in real milk would also expand the possible flavors beyond the tropical. Like I said, I'll have to give this some consideration.

Piña Colada Sherbet

or possibly sorbet. Whether coconut milk counts is a point on which reasonable men can disagree.

This recipe was inspired by a poor freezer packing job that popped the door open while I was at work a few days ago. Nothing got above refrigerator temperature so no bacterial bonanza, but the impromptu defrosting did no good for the texture of some of my freezer's contents, most notably the bananas (awaiting their turn as smoothie components) which turned into mush.

Well, that's perfect for making ice cream so off I went. Also on hand was a pineapple that I wanted to do something with beyond just eating in chunks so a tropical flavor was in order. In Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop I found a tropical sorbet that used bananas and pineapple, but also tangerines and passion fruit which I didn't have. There was also a Piña Colada sherbet that didn't use banana (as the traditional drink recipe doesn't) but did have the intriguing inclusion of coconut milk. So I decided to improvise something somewhere in between with a few touches of my own.

Ingredients:
2 bananas, frozen and defrosted so they get all glorpy
1 1/2 cups pineapple, cut in chunks [fresh is best and the Golden Sweet variety is a good choice.]
1 cup canned coconut milk [not Coco Lopez which is sweetened. I should look into fresh. If I'm going to live in a town where I risk getting conked on the head by falling coconuts I should at least reap the benefits.]
juice of 1/2 lime
1/3 cup Splenda blend or 2/3 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon dark rum [I'm still using up the bottle of light rum I bought last year so I used that]
1 teaspoon kosher salt
6 shots vinegar-based hot sauce [for this application I chose Dat'l Do-it Devil Drops which have a bright fruity flavor and lots of heat.] or a little mint extract or just a shot of vanilla if you're not feeling adventurous



Just put everything in a blender, blend until smooth, chill to 40 degrees F, churn as per your machines instructions and ripen overnight.


And here's the end result. The texture is impeccably soft, creamy and smooth with not a hint of ice crystals or fruit fiber and the flavor is that lovely tropical synergy of banana, pineapple and coconut with a just noticeable note of pepper and a trace of burn to round it out. Neither the rum nor the off chemical taste Splenda can have are at all noticeable. If you want to taste the rum, I'd suggest making a rum float instead of adding more to the mix. And it's low fat and relatively low calorie. A big hit in my Weight Watching office.

CSA week 18 - Filipino caimito-banana sherbet

If you Googled for "caimito recipe" you couldn't miss this one as it dominates the first page of results. Well, just because it's popular doesn't mean it isn't good (assuming it actually is popular as it's not evident that anyone who posted the recipe actually made it) and I did find the idea of a sherbet made with evaporated milk an interesting one so I decided to give it a try.

I started by cutting the recipe by two thirds to make it a reasonable amount to fit in my ice cream churn. My calculations were a bit off as it turns out and I could have just cut it in half. Second, the meat of both my star apples amounted to something under a full cup so I added a chunk of frozen banana to fill it out. I intended to do that anyway as banana would serve to add extra flavor elements and improve the texture of the final result. I was also concerned about texture problems from just dumping in the sugar without dissolving it so I made a simple syrup with the sugar and water before adding it to the other ingredients in the blender. The rest of the changes are just little flavor tweaks: I added a pinch of salt, a few drops of vanilla, and a few grates of nutmeg. So here's what I actually made:

1 scant cup ripe caimito, seeded and mashed
sufficient banana to complete the cup (I'd add more next time and increase the water a little)
85% of a small can of Evaporated Milk (125 ml)
1/3 cup sugar
2/3 cups water

1 pinch salt
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

Boil sugar and water until sugar dissolves. Blend all until smooth. Chill overnight. Churn. Ripen.


The mixture solidified in a rather unpleasant way in refrigerator. That doesn't necessarily bode ill for the final result after churning, but with the already questionable sapote-family texture of the caimito I was concerned. I ended up thinning the mixture out with another quarter cup or so of water during churning which seemed to help.

After churning, the final texture isn't as bad as I feared; It's a bit crumbly in the bowl, but it melts nicely in the mouth with only a hit of that custardy sapote texture. It has a lovely violet color which is nice. The flavor is interesting as it is straightforwardly and pleasantly tropical, but not immediately identifiable as caimito. The fruits and the other flavors I added have blended seamlessly.

That's kind of interesting. Pina colada and strawberry/pineapple/banana do that blending thing too. I wonder if there's something in particular about tropical fruits that allows their flavors to combine so well.

CSA week eight - dulce de sapote negro sherbet

If you looked on the web at all to see what to do with the black sapote then you came across the recipe for dulce de sapote negro. At the end there's a note offering the option of freezing it for a sorbet which sounded like a good idea but I decided I wanted to make sherbet instead.

What exactly sherbet is is hard to pin down. The current usage of the word is local to the U.S. and quite new so it hasn't really settled down in either spelling or meaning. Sherbet occupies a middle ground between sorbet (frozen sweetened fruit juice and pulp) and ice cream (frozen flavored milk and cream). Sherbet recipes take sorbet and add milk or cream or egg yolks or egg whites.

Actually, adding milk or cream is a bad idea as it thins out the flavors and the solid ingredients hampering the freezing process. What you really want to do is to replace some of the liquid in a sorbet recipe (either water or juice). Adjusting an ice cream recipe to a sherbet is harder; I suppose replacing the cream with more fruit and sugar water might work, but that's hardly the same recipe.

Adding egg yolks makes sense as they add a fatty richness and thicken the fruit mix. Adding egg whites, on the other hand, is puzzling. They don't add any flavor or any richness. They might lighten a recipe but 1) alcohol does a much better job of lightening by working with the mechanical properties of ice crystals and 2) the texture of frozen egg whites is really unpleasant. Even odder, most recipes call for them to whipped before being put into the churn which is a perfectly designed meringue-destroying machine.

I've got a theory about this. There is a substantial minority of ice cream recipes that, instead of using an ice cream churn, call for folding the flavoring ingredients into whipped cream and then freezing. If you wanted to make a low fat version of this, substituting whipped egg whites for the whipped cream is a natural thing to try. Remember that without a churn, you just can't make sorbet. You can make granita but that's not nearly the same thing. If you want a light ice-cream like dish without a churn, there aren't many other options. I suspect that a tradition of making sherbet this way, separate from the dairy version, evolved but people forgot why they were adding the egg whites so the recipes didn't change when churns became readily and cheaply available. Anyway, that's what I figure.

But on to the recipe. Before I started researching egg white sherbets that was my plan. My previous attempt at a sapote frozen dessert turned out pretty dense and gritty. As it turned out, black sapotes and mamey sapotes are very different fruit (or possibly my mamey sapote was under-ripe and I'm lucky people couldn't get it out of the container considering the upset tummies it would have given them) and making sherbet with them had different requirements. Using the dulce recipe as a base I substituted in a cup of milk for a cup of the orange juice. I really wanted to do this instead of just freezing it into a sorbet because I wanted to reduce the orange flavor and let the mild sapote come through.

And, by the way, while the fruit pulp certainly looks like chocolate pudding, I really don't think people would be saying it tastes like chocolate if they were tasting it blindfolded. But I thought that about carob too so what do I know?

I made a few other changes to highlight the sapote. I used the more neutral lemon rind instead of orange rind. And I cut out some of the honey and used sugar instead. That also cut down a little on the water to help with the freezing. The vanilla I added as a grace note; it works well in the background to bring depth to tropical flavors. The rum I added for the usual reason; it reduces the size of the ice crystals and gives a smoother final product. In this case, the flavor of the rum matched beautifully with the other ingredients so I may have added a bit too much. You can see that in the not-very-thick churned result (or maybe not. My lighting has been awful recently). It didn't melt very quickly though so I'm hopeful that it will remain soft and retain the churned in air as it ripens in the freezer. I cut the rum down for the recipe, but you might boost it back up again.

One final note, you may have noticed the combination of citrus juice and dairy products and are wondering about curdling. The milk did, in fact, curdle a little, but that helps the thickening and the churning process breaks up the lumps so it worked out fine.


Dulce de Sapote Negro sherbet

Ingredients
4 small or 2 large black sapotes (very soft to ensure their ripeness)
1/4 cup light honey
1/8 cup raw sugar (adjust sweetness depending on how sweet your fruit ingredients are)
1 Tablespoon grated lemon rind
1 cup orange juice
1 cup milk
1 Tablespoon light rum
1 teaspoon vanilla

1. Remove stems from sapotes.
2. Pull off green skin with your fingers or the edge of a knife. It should come off easily in large chunks taking a little of the pulp with it. You now have a dark brown, thick pulp. Inside are hidden almond-shaped seeds.
3. Remove the seeds with your fingers.
4. In food processor, combine everything.
5. Pulse until mixed well.
6. Chill. Mixture is bright, shiny black-brown and slightly thickened.
7. Freeze in ice cream maker according to directions
8. Ripen overnight in the freezer.

So how does it taste? At least straight from the churn, you can identify the sapote, the orange, the honey and the rum in each bite but they all work together too. It's a nice chord of flavors but nothing synergistic.

The picture up top is the ripened final result. The flavor didn't change much, perhaps the rum is a little more pronounced. The texture stayed soft but looks a little grittier. It still melts smooth and milkily (not creamily given the lack of cream, obviously) on the tongue though so it's just cosmetic.

[Edit: I've got another black sapote sherbet recipe that's at least as good. Click here.]

Ice Cream Experiment #13 - New fruit

The aforementioned mamey sapote ripened surprisingly well over just one day in my pantry. Of course, my pantry spends most of the day at 90 degrees so it usually looks like that time lapse film of a rotting fruit bowl in there. I pulled the mamey out just in time and it was close to its peak when I put it to use. The texture was creamy and smooth, not like banana, but more like papaya or avocado. The flavor was unmistakably tropical--somewhere near papaya or guava--with maybe a touch of sweet squash.

I substituted it in for bananas in this recipe. I also switched out the corn syrup for Spenda blend. That let me cut the calories a bit and I figure leaving out corn syrup is its own reward. I know a bit of corn syrup can keep a sugar syrup from crystallizing, but I can't figure out why you'd use just corn syrup in an ice cream recipe. I also used milk instead of the cream. I didn't need the cream when I made banana ice cream (ice milk really) before and I figured I'd do fine without now.



That banana ice cream was actually a bananas foster ice cream so I included nutmeg, allspice, orange zest, brown sugar and rum to complement the banana (I'll post the full recipe next week some time). From my reading on mamey sapote, the complementary flavors are vanilla, cinnamon and lime. I decided to go all out and scrape out a vanilla pod, grate off some whole cinnamon (well, cassia. I don't have any real cinnamon) and squeeze in some fresh lime. A full pod was probably a bit much, but I only thought of that after splitting it all the way.

Those three, plus a bit over a pound of mamey and a cup of milk went into the blender. The end result was thicker than your average ice cream mix and stuck to the inside of the blender so after scraping it out I added a bit more milk and gave it a spin to dissolve. The end result still turned nearly solid in the refrigerator after a few hours cooling.





Churning went quickly, but the texture actually went from smooth to a bit lumpy. That was probably the start of a more solid freezing, but I have a habit of pulling out my ice cream a bit early. I tend to be afraid the bucket is losing its chill in my hot kitchen and more churning will see the process start to reverse. Be that as it may, here's what it looked like coming out of the churn. Here, in the soft-serve stage, the texture on the tongue is a bit gritty; unlike the banana ice cream, you can definitely tell it's mostly fruit. The flavor is not as complex or rich as I would have liked; the grace notes of vanilla, cinnamon and lime are pretty much lost. Or maybe not, I don't have a clear recollection of what the fresh mamey tasted like. Maybe the current flavor is a melange.

After ripening, the texture turned out more solid than I'd like. I should have treated it like a sorbet and added some rum or vodka to break up the sugar crystals. That must be what the corn syrup is for, too. I'd think the fructose in the fruit would be sufficient, but clearly not. The bananas foster ice cream had a full 1/4 cup of rum which may account for the resulting texture as much as the bananas did (and the roasting of the bananas may well have had an effect, too).

Next time I get my hands on a mamey, I'll add rum and I'll roast the fruit which I hope will break it down and lose the gritty mouth feel. Also, I think I'll put a half cup of cream back in. Couldn't hurt. Still and all, I'd call this a good first-attempt mamey sapote sherbet.