Week Twenty-Four: Sorbet

Sorbet has an even longer history than ice cream. The earliest forerunners of ice cream were essentially sorbets, in that they were ice mixed with a sweet flavouring. The first introduction of a dairy product was in China, sometime between 618 and 907; the discovery that salt mixed with ice helps lower the freezing point probably also came from China. This enabled ices to be frozen, rather than relying on naturally frozen ice. Ice cream didn’t enter Europe until about the 1500s, until then it was sorbet all the way.

The Gunter’s confectioners called sorbets ‘water ices’. They generally had a very high crossover between each other, with most of their recipes being near enough identical, although Jeanes was the only one to give measurements beyond ‘a little’ and ‘enough to flavour’. I was thinking of making what they all call grape water ice but is really elderflower, mainly because I love elderflower as a flavour, but then I saw one of the unique water ice recipes: Jeanes had a recipe for banana water ice. I’m not actually a massive fan of bananas but like most of my food aversions, it’s a texture problem not a taste one. I enjoy the taste of banana but I hate how mushy they feel. 

Banana water ice

Ingredients

There were no specific amounts used by Jeanes, it was all based on ratios. This was the amount that a bunch of five bananas made, but as always use the percentages.

310.27g banana purée (see below) (45.33%)
260.08g water (38%)
114.07g caster sugar (16.67%)

Method

1. Make the banana purée - use a blender to pulp the bananas, then pass it through a sieve; you will need to force it through the sieve, it won’t just drip through

2. Add the water and sugar, and whisk thoroughly (I use a stand mixer and balloon whisk)

3. This doesn’t necessarily need to chill but I’d suggest leave it in the fridge for several hours to let the flavour strengthen

4. Re-whisk and pass through a sieve again; you may find some pushing is still needed

5. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions; stop churning once the water ice is no longer moving through the paddle but is almost ‘clumped’ to it

6. Put into a container and freeze for at least four hours, preferably overnight

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1DfDPxSsQvRSS_HTlyfEMpnHnhYIJUaYv
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1xHvmr4Ks8RnBRvkC5zu8mrUThjj8_8fs

So, it turns out I possibly don’t like banana as a taste, either that or they were mushy even in a water ice. Other people have said this is very nice, but I don’t like it one bit. I did really like the strawberry water ice I made in preparation, and that has even easier ratios: juice some strawberries, weigh how much juice you have and add half of that weight in water and half of it in sugar, then follow the same instructions from whisk onwards. That was extremely nice, and as we enter the summer I’m hoping to make more refreshing water ices.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week One: Basics

Image
On a reddit called  52 Weeks of Ice Cream , the aim is (unsurprisingly) to make 52 ice creams in 2024, following a weekly theme. As I’m essentially an ice cream tinkerer and newly armed with a fancy ice cream machine, this appealed greatly, and so here we are.  The first theme is ‘basics’ and what would be more basic than making what is literally my base ice cream? It only uses three ingredients (and two of those are variants of each other) and instructions that are essentially ‘weigh’ and ‘mix’. I made 600g but I do everything in ice cream by percentages, and I’ve given those too so you can make any amount you like. Ingredients: 340.2g single (19% fat) cream (56.7%) 139.2g whipping (39% fat) cream (23.2%) 120.6g caster sugar* (20.1%) * Caster sugar seems to be a UK thing; it’s very fine granulated sugar, different to powdered/confectioner’s/icing sugar in that it has nothing else added to it; granulated sugar will work instead, or could be ground down to make DIY caster sugar...
Read more

Week Eight: With a Twist

Image
I was initially not sure what to do for With a Twist week. The first thought was some form of drink/cocktail based ice cream, taking ‘with a twist’ as in ‘scotch on the rocks.’ But, I don’t drink, and none of the classic drinks that come with a twist (a twist being a small slice of fruit, usually citrus of some sort) had easy non-alcoholic versions; they tend to be very alcohol based, unlike something like a piña colada which essentially turns into a pineapple coconut milkshake. There was an excellent cocktail bar in Wrexham (yes, the city where Ryan Reynolds owns the football team) called Voodoo Moon that made the best virgin piña coladas, and everything really - I’m still sad it’s closed now. I digress. No cocktail based ice cream. So instead I looked at other uses of ‘ with a twist’, and landed on the Todd Rundgren album With A Twist, bossa nova style versions of his previous songs, and I thought yes. Brazil.  (I promise this becomes relevant in a minute.) We tend to think of ve...
Read more

Week Twenty-Five: Summer

First of all, I will confess I had to cheat this one a little bit: I’ve gone away for a fortnight and would have been unable to make this ice cream fully within week twenty-five, so I churned it the day before and just photographed it during week twenty-five. And I’m going to have to pull out the stops to get week twenty-six done during its week too! When I think of summer, I think of feeling trapped inside my house because I neither want to get too hot nor encounter insects that may mean me harm. I like the theory of bees and have even visited a bee farm, but the reality is they scare me a bit because my buzz sensors go off and alert me that it could be a wasp before I see that it’s a bee. And, as I tell my cats, we don’t play with wasps (they don’t always listen to me…) From bees, I then, naturally, thought of honey.  Honey is a type of sugar; more accurately it’s made of sugars, mostly fructose with a little sucrose. I’ve written a little on different types of sugar before when ...
Read more