Saturday, February 21, 2009

Cranberry & Port Sorbet

For Christmas this year I got a beeeauuutiful ice cream machine, the Magimix Gelato Chef 2200 which is awesome as it removes a huge amount of the tedium involved in making tasty frozen treats.

So, as it was Christmas morning, I went straight to work preparing a few festive delights and the very first thing I experimented with was making something fairly safe - a Cranberry & Port sorbet. This is straightforward but one must always keep in mind that when working with alcohol it will have a direct effect on how long it takes for your recipe to freeze.

Right then, ingredients:

9 0z. fresh cranberries
1 3/4 cups water
1 cup sugar
5 Tbsp ruby port

OK kids, it really doesn't get much easier than this:

Dump the cranberries and the water in a small sauce pan, bring to the boil, then simmer untill the berries are soft.

Blend the resulting mixture (careful here or you may have a hell of a cleanup job!)

Push the resulting slurry through a fine sieve (nylon if you have one) into a bowl.

Add sugar and port, then stir until the sugar has dissolved.

Pop the bowl into the fridge to cool down for a few hours (at least 2). You can, of course, accelerate this process by seating the bowl within a larger container of ice, but be careful that the melting ice doesn't cause the inner bowl to sink and slop water in!

I then poured the mix into my my new toy, turned it on, and about 30 minutes later had a wonderfully refreshing sorbet. It's not sweet. The sugar is just enough to take the edge off of the bitterness of the cranberries and it made a marvelous palate cleanser.

If you are not blessed with a shit hot ice cream maker, you can still follow this recipe but will have to do all the freezing and churning manually.

1 comment:

Barb said...

I'm going to try making this tomorrow - the old bowl in the freezer/mix and grind it a few times as it freezes method - not having a magical ice cream machine. It was amazingly delicious when you made it.