Raspberry Sorbet

Here’s the last of the four flavours we made on Blackford Hill recently.

This Raspberry Sorbet was absolutely delicious – probably one of the best sorbets I’ve ever made!

Thibault and Celine hoped to make a Peach and Basil Sorbet, but had no luck at finding ripe peaches. Instead they bought a few punnets of raspberries from Europe (we’re still waiting for the Scottish raspberry season…).

Oddly I had never made raspberry sorbet before and had only tried them in ice creams. We didn’t weigh the berries so I can’t really say how many we had, but we spent some considerable effort separating the seeds from the juice and flesh. Without a muslin cloth, the process of pushing them through a sieve was a bit tedious…

But then Celine had an ingenious idea. She got one of her (clean!) stockings and squeezed the juice through the fabric. It worked brilliantly!

So in the end we had a little over a quart of smooth raspberry pulp in the half-gallon ice cream can. I made a sugar syrup with 500g of sugar and 500ml of water and added most of it to the raspberries. The saccharometer wasn’t very useful since it doesn’t really work in thick liquids so we had to gauge the sugar content by taste. I added some lemon juice and some water to reach a satisfying level of sweetness.

We then took it up to the hill with the other three ice cream machines and cranked up an amazingly delicious sorbet. Eating it in the wind and rain, it could not have been more satisfying!