Fresh from the Freezer

  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. When a recipe is close to perfection, I want nothing more than to tweak it and help it achieve frozen dessert enlightenment. When I first made this strawberry lemonade sorbet recipe, it was absolutely delicious. I was mad at how easy it was to make. It was the best sorbet I’d ever made, and pretty much all I did was blend it and churn it. It had a perfect flavor balance between strawberry and lemon, a plush mouthfeel, and a refreshing overall vibe.  Just look at how PLUSH!   However, it was difficult to scoop once it had been in the freezer for a few days. Why don’t I try to fix this? I thought. These photos were taken just after churning. It ended up freezing too hard later on.  I went down a rabbit hole reading all about how to make the perfect sorbet—how adding water ruins the flavor, how too much sugar makes it sickeningly sweet—and I adjusted accordingly. I also omitted the guar gum, because I wanted to make it easier fo...

I almost didn’t post this recipe because it isn’t seasonally appropriate. Cranberry is more of a fall or winter flavor. But in truth, I need to post something this month if I want to keep up my new year’s resolution of posting here once a month. It’s 10:07 PM on May 31 st as I write this post. This recipe’s all I’ve got. This sorbet is dense and creamy, the natural result of pectin-rich cranberries blended with just a few other ingredients. I made a very large batch of it for Hanukkah, and half a year later, there’s still a little bit in the freezer. Don’t get me wrong; it’s delicious. It’s just so heavy , and I can’t eat it all the time. Recently, I found a description online for how to turn fruit puree into juice. I think doing that would help produce a lighter, more refreshing sorbet. For now, please enjoy this dense and creamy sorbet. It’s zippy, sweet, and tart, with just the right amount of orange juice to mellow out any bitterness from the cranberries. This is definite...

By all accounts, this recipe should not work. Before I make ice cream (or most other frozen treats, for that matter), I first run the recipe through icecreamcalc to get an idea of how it will turn out. In my opinion, one of the worst things is an ice cream recipe that ends up being too hard to scoop. I like using icecreamcalc to make sure that the ice cream will be nice and scoopable even when it’s... well... fresh from the freezer. When I plug David Lebovitz’s Chocolate Sorbet/Sherbet recipe into icecreamcalc under the “sorbet” setting, everything looks all wrong. The water is too low, the solids are too high, and it’s all too sweet. Theoretically, this chocolate sorbet should turn out grainy, overly sweet, and fatty. Instead, this chocolate sorbet comes out richer and more decadent than any chocolate ice cream you’ve ever had while somehow also managing to be light and refreshing. It’s impossibly creamy and tastes like you churned a brownie. It’s also accidentally vegan as ...