Elderflowers
, so I’m writing it down somewhere I can find it more easily. It’s summery, tasty and Gooseberries are in season at the moment. Whilst they freeze well on their own, I think this is a nicer way of preserving them through the year. My home crop was pretty rubbish this year, I lost the annual fight with the Sawfly and my bushes managed a few small, sweet berries before the leaves were eaten away.
I get on ok using my homemade Elderflower Cordial but if you’re lucky it’s just still in season to use fresh elderflowers. To do that, boil up a few heads of elderflowers in the syrup for a few minutes, strain them and the bugs out and then carry on with the gooseberries.
Ingredients
Ingredients
250g white sugar
250ml water
275g gooseberries
3 mint leaves
50-75ml Elderflower Cordial (to taste)
1 tablespoon of fragrant gin (entirely optional, don’t be tempted to add too much or it’ll never set)
Remember to freeze the ice cream machine’s bowl overnight
Method
Cooked but not frozen
If you want your sorbet to look particularly green and taste strongly of gooseberries, use half the quantity of syrup.
Put the sugar and water into a pan and heat it up until it dissolves into a heavy syrup, then add the mint and gooseberries and simmer for a few minutes until they’re soft and squishy.
Take off the heat and blat with a stick blender until the skins have been chopped up. Stir in a glug of Elderflower Cordial and the gin if you’re using it, decant into a jug and chill in the fridge for a couple of hours.
Once it’s at Fridge temperature, decant it again into the final tub you’ll be using and give it an hour in the freezer to get a couple more degrees of heat out of it. Sorbet can be hard to churn using a passively chilled machine if it’s not already at 0-4 degrees C.
Now churn it for about 15-20 minutes, until it holds its own shape.
Put it back into the tub and freeze it until you want to eat it.
Churned Gooseberry and Elderflower Sorbet
