Sunday 24 February 2013

Melon Sorbet


So many fragrant melons... the obvious thing to do is make melon sorbet.



Making sorbet is pretty simple, although if you don't have an ice cream maker it does require you to be home for a whole day and to remember to tend to the sorbet every hour or so.

There are all kinds of recipes out there, but seeing as I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to sorbet I chose the simplest recipe with only three ingredients;  melons, water and sugar.

I wizzed up three peeled and deseeded rockmelons in a blender, added some sugar syrup and put it in the freezer.

Pretty simple so far

It was all coming together pretty well and starting to freeze nicely when I decided to taste it. It was so sweet, too sweet. Definitely unpleasant sweet...

So I chopped and deseeded some watermelon, wizzed it in the blender and added it to the sorbet mixture. It tasted much better, sublime in fact, and even had a new more beautiful rosy color.



It is important to stir up the sorbet mixture several times while it freezes, otherwise you will end up with a hard, melon flavoured ice cube.

Stirring up the semi frozen mixture

MELON SORBET

3 kilo melons (I used three rockmelons and 1 small watermelon)
150g sugar
1/2 cup water

Obviously, I had a lot of melons sitting around when I made this, but you can scale this recipe down pretty easily if you only have one melon. You can also change the amount of sugar depending on how sweet the melons are. In my case the melons were extremely sweet and I probably had a bit too much sugar.


Make the sugar syrup by combining the sugar and water, and heating until the sugar has dissolved. Leave to cool.


Peel and deseed the melons, chop and process in a blender.

Combine the melon and sugar syrup, place in wide bowl and put it in the freezer. For the first 3 hours, just leave the sorbet in the freezer. After that, remove the bowl every hour or so and stir up the sorbet mixture. I used an electric beater, you could also use a blender, whisk or even a fork. Keep doing this until it is properly frozen and sorbet-like, or until you have to leave the house/go to bed.

Rockmelons...