CSA week three - grapefruit-passionfruit sorbet

No story here, just an idea I had.

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups grapefruit, fruit extracted from various membranes
1/4 cup passionfruit pulp and seeds
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon honey
1 sizable squeeze lime
1 Tablespoon vodka
2 pinches salt
1/4 teaspoon tandori spice (coriander, ginger and cardamom mostly. Some garlic, cumin and paprika in there too)

1. Extract the grapefruit meat, removing the membranes and seeds.

2. Heat the water and sugar until the sugar dissolves. Add to the grapefruit and blend.

3. Add the passionfruit and everything else. Mix well, chill, churn and freeze.

You'll have noticed one unusual item in the ingredient list. I knew I wanted something to cut the grapefruit's bitterness beyond just more sugar and, while I was looking through the spice cabinet, the tandori spice mix presented itself.


In the final flavor mix it comes off less tandori and more spice cake and acts as a rich undertone to the sweet, sour and bitter notes of the fruit. It's distinctly separate so it doesn't temper the bitterness quite as I had hoped (the flavors blended better when the mixture was warm). The passionfruit does tone the grapefruit down a bit, though, rounding out the fruit flavors. It adds some really interesting mottling in color, texture and even flavor as the two fruits never quite fully broke up or blended together.

It's an unusual mixture of flavors that, I think, works. It isn't synergistic into some crowd-pleasing form, though; nobody's going to eat a big bowlful and come back for seconds, but I think folks will finish that first bowl. I'll add an addendum once I've found someone else to try it.

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.

CSA week six - tomato-carambola sorbet

This isn't an unusual combination for salads (and if you haven't tried it, you should) and I always have an eye out for interesting possibilities for sorbets and ice creams. And interesting this did turn out to be.  

Ingredients:

1 1/2 tomatoes, peeled and seeded

2 medium carambola, peeled as best you can and seeded (which is easier than you'd expect if you don't mind unsightly shredded results)

5 fluid ounces sugar (I used a not-fully refined sugar with a bit of molasses still in it)

5 fluid ounces water 

1 pinch salt

juice from one thick lime wedge

1 Tablespoon light rum

1. Purée the tomato and carambola. I ended up with about 2 cups worth so I scaled the other ingredients to match.

2. Make a simple syrup by bringing the sugar, salt and water to a simmer. Let it cool for a few minutes.

3. Mix everything in a blender. You're blending the fruit twice to get it extra smooth.

4. Chill, churn, ripen, scoop. You know the drill.

You can see in the picture that the texture isn't as smooth as my sorbets usually get. I skimped a bit on the rum and over-churned. I've since broken it up like a granita so it's more crumbly than solid which isn't too bad. It'll smooth out as it melts a little.

The tomatoes from this week's CSA share never ripened quite right so the sorbet has that tart, resinous flavor slightly under-ripe tomatoes have. It's an interesting match with the tartness of the carambolas and the slight acid of the lime. I've got to admit that of all the ridiculous flavors of ice cream and sorbet I've made this is the first one that's really wierded me out. It's bright and fruity--the tomato and carambola seamlessly blended into a quite pleasant tropical-noted flavor, but it's still clearly under-ripe tomato in there and it's hard to get past that. I'm going to offer this to my co-workers without telling them what's in it to see if the tomato really is that obvious and how it goes over without that knowledge. 

CSA week three - Hibiscus sorbet

I was confused by the paragraph about hibiscus in last weeks newsletter but I didn't know I was until I did some more reading. Margie (or whoever wrote it) said that the calyxes were the outside flower parts so I went looking for ways to use the flowers.

The amounts on the recipes didn't make sense, but that turned out to be because they were talking about dried flowers without saying so. The real clue that something was off was the accompanying pictures. Hibiscus flowers look nothing like what we have.

I did a little more digging and found pictures that did match. Calyxes are sometimes called flowers but they're something else entirely. That plasticy sphere in the middle is a seed pod and the fleshy petals surrounding it are something halfway between a fruit and a pine cone.

Because the calyxes are so much more substantial than the flowers they're rather more culinarily versatile. According to Fruits of Warm Climates by Julia Morton (who used to be the director of the Morton Collectanea here at U Miami) "They may be merely chopped and added to fruit salads. In Africa, they are frequently cooked as a side-dish eaten with pulverized peanuts. For stewing as sauce or filling for tarts or pies, they may be left intact, if tender, and cooked with sugar." The flavor and texture of the stewed calyxes, she says, are hard to distinguish from cranberry sauce.

That put me in mind of this post on the I Shot the Chef blog for shortbread bar cookies using leftover cranberry sauce which I thought would be fun to try. Obviously from the subject line of this post I failed, but that's how I started out.

The problem was that I didn't know how much water to use when stewing the amount of hibiscus I had. Two cups seemed reasonable, but I forgot that, unlike cranberries, hibiscus calyxes don't have any pectin in them. The water was going to get a lot of flavor, but it wasn't going to thicken up into jam. So I got my stewed hibiscus, but I didn't want to waste all that flavor in the water. And when I've got flavored water with bits of something-kind-of-like-fruit floating in it, I'm thinking sorbet.

Ingredients:
1 CSA share hibiscus calyxes, seed pods removed
2 cups water
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 Tablespoon light rum
1 Tablespoon lime juice
1/4 teaspoon fresh grated ginger
1/4 teaspoon dried mint leaves
pinch salt


1. Roughly chop the calyxes and add to boiling water. Simmer for around five minutes and add the sugar. Simmer until the mixture gets a syrupy texture. I honestly wasn't paying attention so I don't know how long it took. Twenty minutes maybe?



2. Cool for a half hour and flavor with perhaps too many other ingredients. I think I'd leave out the mint and vanilla next time and boost up the ginger until there was some notable spiciness.

3. Cool in the refrigerator, churn, ripen in the freezer and scoop it up.


There's been an odd flavor change now that the sorbet has ripened. When the mix was warm, refrigerated and even right out of the churn it, as advertised, tasted a lot like cranberries: sweet and tart with intriguing floral notes (rounded out by all the other stuff I added) and I liked it a lot. But fully frozen both of those prominent aspects are weakened allowing the perfume that lingered around the edges to become the primary flavor and, unfortunately, it's rather bitter. But at least it's definitely hibiscus and not cranberries. I was worried it would go the other way and it would just taste like just another tart berry sorbet.

There are textural issues too as I didn't blend the mix long enough and it's full little chunks of calces. That can be OK for an ice cream, but sorbets should be perfectly smooth. I don't think anyone's going to be eating this--nobody's eating the black sapote sherbet and that's actually really good--so I'll probably melt it down, run it through the blender again, strain it out, boil it down to a syrup and use it to make cocktails with ginger ale and rum.

You, on the other hand, need to stew yours up, serve them with peanuts, and tell me how it goes.

CSA - Lemon basil avocado sorbet

After my failure with last week's avocado sherbet I wanted to jump back on the horse, but a) other than the problems with the lavender I was happy with the results in general and I wasn't interested in doing it again immediately and b) I didn't have quite enough avocado left. So instead I decided to add a bit of avocado to lemon sorbet to see what happens. I've never made a citrus sorbet before so that was interesting in itself as well.

My initial research turned up lots of different lemon sorbet recipes on-line which varied surprisingly widely on how much lemon and how much sugar to use. With the variation in lemons' size and flavor and not having tried this before I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop hasn't let me down yet so that seemed a safe starting point. He was one of the few recipe authors who described the resulting flavor--"tangy"--plus his was the only recipe that specified mixing in the lemon juice at the last minute. I don't know how that would be important, but it shows he's been thinking, anyway.

So I started with 1/2 cup of water, a cup of sugar and the zest from one really big lemon. I heated that up until the sugar was dissolved. Then I poured that into a blender along with about 3/4 cup of avocado and enough more water to bring the volume up to 2 1/2 cups.

After blending, I was a bit surprised to see that the mix wasn't letting go of its air bubbles. That uneven reflection you can see in the picture is from the knobbly bubbly surface of the mix. I had no idea avocado was a foam stabilizer. This was a good sign.

While that was chilling, it was time to get a cup of juice. Or it would be if I hadn't decided that I wanted all the pulp too. Most sorbets get some additional texture from the solid bits of the fruit and I wanted to add that here if I could. So I ended up doing some careful microsurgery to peel a few lemons and either peel away the connective membranes or cut supremes. Once I had a cup I decided not to run it through the blender as I had originally planned. I liked the idea of little packets of pure lemon juice mixed in with the sweetened sorbet around it. So I just mushed up lemon bits to release about half the juice but leave the rest encapsulated. And that got chilled too.

The next day they got mixed and into the churn. This is when I got an inkling that I may have made a mistake. The freezing process, usually so elegant for sorbets, was ugly and clumpy. Who really wants texture in a sorbet anyway? Well, too late to back out now.

To add a bit more interest to the flavor, just before the mix was done churning I added a quarter cup of chopped fresh basil. Visually, the flecks of green are quite nice, but it's more to chew on which, again, might not have been the best idea. But too late now.

After churning, I ripened it in the freezer and here's the results. I still like the look, but, yeah, the texture isn't great. There is nice smooth sorbet, but it's got chunks of frozen lemon, bits of loose pulp and little leaves floating in it. I'm of half a mind to melt it down, run it through the blender and churn it again.
...
Now I'm of a full mind to do it.








So, before:








after:









and afterer:










and even afterer:


The texture is much improved with that perfect creaminess that I'm still amazed that sorbet can achieve. Maybe it's frozen up a little more solidly than your average sorbet. There wasn't any alcohol included so that hurt it but maybe the avocado helped? Further investigation is required.

The basil flavor is now well distributed and maybe there's a hint of avocado there too. You can tell that straight lemon sorbet would be like a piece of hard candy: just citrus and sweet melting on the tongue. The basil makes it significantly more interesting. The flavors aren't blended into anything synergistic--the lemon and basil are clearly distinguishable--but they go well together and take the edge off each other. Italian sweet basil would probably have worked better than the Thai basil I've got. Lemon basil would probably have worked better still. But I've got what I've got and what I've got is certainly plenty nice on a hot Miami day. I may revisit this when the CSA supplies some Italian basil. Maybe I'll use lime instead. ...Argh, I just did a quick Google and found that Jaime Oliver does a basil lime sorbet and Emeril does a basil lemon. OK, I've been saving a perfectly unique ice cream idea and it's going up next in the line-up. Watch this space.

CSA - longan sorbet

Following the tilapia I cooked Saturday, the next item up from this week's CSA is a two pound box of longans. If you're not familiar (and even if you are), longans are a fruit closely related to lychees. They're generally considered to be lychee's poor cousin. It's been a long time since I've had a fresh lychee so I can't make a detailed comparison of the flavors. They're pretty close if memory serves although longan isn't quite as sweet and I noticed honeysuckle notes that I don't recall lychee having. Longan also has a distinctive musky finish that's not to everyone's taste, but personally I like the added complexity.

On the other hand, I really didn't care for the gelatinous texture. So even though I liked the flavor I wasn't going to eat them out of hand. On the plus side, that texture is something I've noticed works well in frozen deserts, so Plan B goes into effect. OK, I'll admit frozen deserts are Plan A; I need the blog fodder. I considered using the longans in another variation on my colada sherbet recipe, but I don't think the longan's flavor is a great match with some of the other ingredients and I do like that flavor enough to want to be able to taste it unadulterated. So sorbet.

That means I'll need three cups of longan flesh and these things are pretty small. Each fruit has a hard outer shell and a large seed so we're talking about over an hour of cutting open each fruit and peeling the somewhat clingy flesh off of the seed. It's a fine thing to do with one's hands while listening to podcasts so I didn't really mind.

It took the full two pounds to produce three cups of longan, but two and a half would be fine if you go scant on the other ingredients. Those other ingredients are 3/4 cup sugar and 3/4 cup water simmered into a simple syrup and two Tablespoons each of lime juice and light rum. All of that goes into the blender for a quick spin and then the refrigerator for a cool down. At this point I'm a little concerned that the extra sweetness and the lime are masking the subtleties of the longan's flavor but I won't know for sure how it will taste until it's ripened.

And now it's tomorrow and I can tell you that the subtleties of the flavor don't survive the process. And with the added sweetness it's hard to distinguish from lychee. Better for people who don't much like longan, but I'm a bit disappointed. The texture turned out quite well--smooth and creamy without noticeable fruit bits or ice crystals--and it melts away to nothing on the tongue. I'm curious to compare it with a lychee sorbet. Have I missed the Florida growing season?

Strawberry banana sorbet

[Note: I recently made a strawberry banana ice cream that turned out quite well. If you're not dead set on a sorbet, you might take a look at that recipe too.]

Strawberries were on sale this week so I bought them without any immediate idea of what to do with them. Once it became clear that I wasn't going to snack my way through the entire carton I looked around for ways to use them in ice cream. There were a lot of not-terribly-exciting options. I did notice an interesting lack of chocolate/strawberry ice cream recipes, though, which I may follow up on later. I also considered taking another shot at the basalmic strawberry ice cream I made to try to fix the textural problems I encountered. (Probably by using all real sugar instead of Splenda blend and by excluding the vinegar from the strawberry maceration instead just drizzling it in during churning.) But this week, it's strawberry banana sorbet. Given the magical psuedo-custard properties of bananas, I was curious how it would affect a sorbet's texture.

Also, I wanted to try using red bananas. Most people in the US only have access to the standard supermarket Cavendish banana. In Miami we're lucky to be able to get a few other varietals. Red bananas are the second most common banana and I understand that they have a more berry-like flavor than Cavendishes. (Yes, I know bananas are berries and, by the way, strawberries aren't, but you know what I mean.) Unfortunately I'll never find out myself as I've had these red bananas for two weeks now and they're just as rock solid under-ripe as the day I bought them. So I went out and bought some Cavendishes so I can make this before my strawberries start to rot.

Most of the recipes I found on-line for strawberry banana sorbet were actually sherbets (with milk or cream as an ingredient) or extra-thick smoothies so I decided to cobble together a version from a banana sorbet and a strawberry sorbet in Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop recipe book along with some standard sorbet tricks he didn't use.

1 large banana, as ripe as available
2 pints strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1 Tablespoon lime juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 Tablespoons light rum
1 pinch salt

1. Peel banana and place in freezer.

2. Hull and slice strawberries. Toss with sugar and let macerate for 1 hour at room temperature.

3. Add all ingredients to blender (breaking up banana). Blend until smooth.

4. Cool mixture in refrigerator at least four hours until 40 degrees F. Churn and then ripen in the freezer.


That includes a couple refinements I thought of after I made the recipe myself. I neglected to freeze the banana (which breaks down the bananas' cells and gets it goopy. The blender probably does a fair job of this as well, but the freezer is more thorough.) or add the salt (which brings out the sweetness), but it turned out fine anyway. Here it is straight out of the churn. That's rather thicker than I've seen most of my sorbets get, but my new churn provides a full 25 minutes of freeziness and for a change it isn't over 90 degrees in my kitchen today so it could just be the extra cold and not the banana causing it. The real test will be the mouthfeel after ripening. I'll see tomorrow...

It's tomorrow and I'm quite happy with the creamy texture. If you didn't know, you'd swear there was milk in there (but not cream; let's not go nuts here.). And you'd think it was artificially colored with its vibrant strawberry red. Unfortunately, you might also be wrong about it including banana as that flavor is a bit subtle. On the other hand, the strawberry flavor is bright and clear and yummy. Let's just say the banana is there for textural support.

I'd like to try it again with a different berry and a larger riper banana to see how how the extra refinements I didn't put in this time work out.

Ice Cream Experiment # 11 - With other fruit flavors

Most other food blog posts start with some sort of scene setting--a dinner party or a wretchedly hot day requiring a refreshing adult beverage or some such--but mine generally start with background research. In this particular case, research on guava sorbet recipes. Most of them start with guava nectar or frozen guava puree, but I did find one that called for fresh guava which seemed like a decent enough starting point as I had some guavas I had to do something with.

What it didn't mention is that guavas are full of tooth-crackingly hard tiny little seeds. I suppose they might blend out, but I decided to pass it all through a sieve instead.


That took a fair while. At the end, I had guava nectar, but at least mine was 100% guava. Since I had a bit less than a cup of it, I had to see what other fruit I had around to bring it up to a full two cups. I had about a half cup of frozen strawberries I had sprinkled with sugar to draw out the juices. I had a nearly-overripe apririne or nectarcot or some other odd hybrid which I chopped up and tossed in and a quarter cup of frozen pineapple. Then a couple tablespoons of rum, a tablespoon or so of lime juice and a teaspoon of vanilla to finish it off. So, lots of different flavors in there, but I think the guava remains notably on top.

Simple enough at this point. Add all that mess to a cup of water and a 1/4 cup of Splenda/sugar blend, simmer for 15 minutes and blend smooth.



Then chill, churn and freeze. I got a really nice texture this time around.



That's partly from the alcohol in the rum, but also because I've started scraping down the sides of the ice cream machine bucket every few minutes.

You know, other than deciding to add strawberries and then padding it out with every fruit in the house this was actually a pretty boring recipe. Sorry about that. I've got a few more interesting things lined up for coming weeks.