Flushed with success from my first attempts at sorbet, it’s time to head off into the realms of something more interesting. As luck would have it, one of my friends at work was happy to swap a kilo of freshly harvested plums from his tree for a go with my new toy. The way his family reacted to it leads me to suspect he’ll be getting one of his own soon enough.

Plums have a lot more substance to them than lemon juice, so I tried a different base recipe for this with a smaller quantity of a heavier syrup. As ever with such things, processing the fruit took most of the time.

Ingredients

Makes 500ml of sorbet 500g firm plums 100ml water 200g sugar

Plums

Method

First we need to get the plums as pureed as possible. Slice them off the stones, keeping the skins (that’s where all the colour is) and put them into a pan. Big chunks is fine, maybe 2 or 3 pieces per plum.

Plums and syrup warming

Slowly heat them up to get the juice out of them, starting to break down the flesh and soften the skins. You shouldn’t need to dilute it with any water if you’re slow enough. When they’ve simmered for 10 minutes or so, blitz to a puree with a stick blender and then push through a sturdy sieve to make it smooth.

Strained plums

Dissolve the sugar into the water to make a heavy syrup and thoroughly mix in the plum juice. Chill it down to to nearly frozen for a couple of hours. At this point, the mixture looked almost orange and tasted fairly sharp.

Chilled down plum syrup

Churn it for 30 minutes in the machine to set the crystals nice and small. This worked in a lot of air to the finished product which made it light enough to cope fine with the tartness of the plums. It came out a subtle shade of pink from the machine, with the edges a deep purple where it froze to the sides without being churned.

Churned plum sorbet

Scoop it into a container and stir through the darker parts to make a nice swirly effect and freeze it for another 15-30 minutes before serving.

Tastes great, even though it’s a pale pastel shade of pink.

This became firm in the freezer overnight, you might want to leave it 5 minutes before serving.

Frozen plum sorbet

Now I’ve got the basics sorted out, time to move on to the next baby step with the ice cream machine, a straightforward not messing around too much with the recipe Lemon Sorbet. The vanilla ice cream churned and set from chilled within half an hour, so this should be just the same, right? Right? I thought the ice cream set too hard when it froze overnight, so I added a stiff double of gin to my sorbet to help it keep its scoopability.

Ingredients

Makes 800ml of sorbet 500ml water 500g sugar 6 lemons

Lemon Sorbet Ingredients. The pan contains the syrup.

Method

Dissolve the sugar into the water to make a medium syrup.
Whilst that’s going its thing, squeeze all the juice out of the lemons. If you’ve managed to find unwaxed fruit, grate in 1 zest too. Extra marks for working out why unwaxed cost so much more than shiny, wouldn’t it be cheaper to just miss one part out?

I wound up with about 275ml of lemon juice. Yours will vary by the size of your lemons.
Stir it all into the syrup and let it cool to room temperature, then chill it down to as close to freezing as you can get without crystals forming. This took me about two hours with the fridge and freezer!

Churn it for 30 minutes in the machine, then you’ll probably need to give it another 20-30 minutes in the freezer before its firm enough to serve.

Freshly churned Lemon Sorbet

This recipe stayed at the perfect consistency even when frozen for a few days and it tasted excellent in a glass with a slurp of Williamine eau-de-vie poured over.

Frozen homemade Lemon Sorbet

My birthday came a day early today, my new toy got its first outing. Yes, after all the talk of trying to reproduce all the lovely sorbets and ice creams we had on holiday, I’ve now got an ice cream machine!

The machine itself is very simple. The bowl is double skinned and contains an amount of freezing fluid, just like the freezer blocks you get for picnics and so on. This gets frozen in the freezer for 12-24 hours before you actually need it. The machine part is a plastic churning whisk thing, attached to a slow moving mains powered motor, with a clockwork timer strapped to the top to stop it going round when the time’s up. The motor rotates continuously which both prevents crystals from forming too large but more importantly it keeps the ice cream mix in contact with the frozen edges of the bowl and therefore makes it actually freeze. Without it turning, the mix just freezes to the edges and the middle doesn’t chill. So yes, when you get down to it, the machine would not be hard to duplicate, although you’d need a bit of torque on your motor and a solid anchor between it and the bowl.

As luck would have it, one of my friends in today’s walking group got one of these gadgets a month ago, so she was able to give us a crash course in the basics. Setting sorbet aside for the moment and concentrating on ice cream, it comes in one of three basic recipes: custard, milk’n'cream and yoghurt. Be very careful with adding fruit, frozen stuff has a lot of added water so could unbalance the quantities, best to stick to pureed and sieved fresh fruit for the time being.

The jury is out on the subject of egg yolks, some recipes don’t call for them to be cooked, which means you’ll be wanting to eat the results in one or two days. Others call for it to be gently cooked, meaning it keeps properly, the custard approach. They all agree that eggs make the texture silkier and some argue that they increase the long term stability. This, at least, won’t be an issue near me. Although I’m not sure how you’re supposed to dissolve the sweetening agent into the milk if you don’t heat it, presumably you’d want a syrup like maltose, glucose or good old honey.

After reading the ingredients list on the side of my favourite brand of ice cream, and because it’s easiest and doesn’t involve remembering to get eggs, I picked the milk and cream approach for my first foray:

Vanilla Ice Cream

Makes 500ml.

Ingredients

300ml milk (whole or semi skimmed, it’s only 6g of cream difference)
200ml double cream
50g sugar
1 vanilla pod

Ice Cream Ingredients

Method

Make sure your ice cream maker’s bowl is left in the freezer until you need it, 24 hours is a good amount.

Gently infuse it up

Put the milk and the sugar in a pan and gently heat, occasionally stirring.
Slit the vanilla pod open with a sharp knife, scoop out the seeds and add the seeds and the pod to the milk to infuse.
When the sugar has dissolved, so the pan’s bottom no longer feels gritty, pour in the cream and get stirring. Don’t quite take it to a boil, remove from the heat when you see it suddenly start to expand.

Leave it to cool to room temperature, then cool it again in the fridge.
This took me about an hour.

Chill it

Now your mix is ready to churn.

Take out the vanilla pod, rinse off the milk and leave it to dry. You’ll be wanting that to infuse into some good caster sugar over the next month or so.
Pour it into the ice cream maker, make sure its whisking away and set the timer for about 30 minutes.

At the end of that, you’ve got what some people call soft scoop ice cream. I much prefer my ice cream firmer than that, so I spooned it into a tupperware and froze it properly. An hour should do.

Churn for 30 minutes

After that, serve in a waffle cone and realise that it’s way way better than most of the shop bought stuff