I found this Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe after being given some redcurrants and wanting to make something a bit different with them. It's just equal quantities of raspberries and redcurrants pulped (whizzed up in a blender or mashed with a potato masher), sieved to remove the pips, sweetened with icing sugar at a ratio of 4:1 fruit to sugar and then frozen. It tastes wonderfully refreshing on a hot day and I ended up re-naming it Tru-Blood Sorbet because the beautiful ruby red colour and slightly gloopy texture looks like the eponymous synthethic blood substitute favoured by
Tru-Blood (Raspberry & Redcurrant) Sorbet
500g raspberries
500g redcurrants
250g icing sugar
1) Mash the fruit up (either in a blender or give it a good whacking with a potato masher).
2) Put a large sieve (preferably a nylon one as a) it's finer and b) a metal one will react with the acid in the fruit) over a large bowl and tip in the mashed fruit. Use a large spatula or spoon to push the fruit through the sieve, leaving you with fruit puree in the bowl and just pips left in the sieve.
3) Whisk the icing sugar into the fruit puree until dissolved. Pour into an ice cream maker and churn until frozen before decanting into a container suitable for the freezer and freeze until needed. If you don't have an ice cream maker, you can serve this as a granita - just pour into a container and freeze and rake it into shards with a sturdy fork before serving.
I've had a go at this one....it was brilliant! Thanks for bringing this recipe to our attention :)
ReplyDeleteI had to use our metal sieve, not being able to find a nylon one for sale locally - of course the sieve came out of the encounter looking all rusty, though it did not seem to affect the sorbet (or perhaps the rust effect merely served to enhance the general bloodiness of the whole affair?)
I also had to increase the raspberry to redcurrant ratio, not having many of the latter. This was fine. I've never seen so many seeds!
Finally, not having an ice cream maker, I went for the granita option. You were not joking about the sturdiness of the fork required. However, after a couple of good forkings, it came out as what I would call a sorbet (though I confess, I do not know what granita is, so can't make the comparison).
Nigel ate some last night and said it was like the sorbets in Italy....what further praise could either of us wish for? ZX
I've now done two more versions of this: plum sorbet and pineapple & mango sorbet.
ReplyDeleteFor the plum one, I followed the same recipe, and thought it turned out a bit sweet (I weighed the plums after stoning them). Unfortunately it looked like oxtail soup before freezing, and like uncooked mince once frozen and forked! It was alright, though - should probably have followed Alison's advice and added some sloe gin to perk it up....
I forgot to weigh the fruit for the pineapple & mango one, so did not know how much sugar to add. The recipe I used was: 1 medium pineapple, 1 large mango, 1/2 lime, 3 dessert spoons of icing sugar. It tasted fine, but the texture was more like snow than sorbet (granita???) Maybe the sugar is important for the texture?