Chocolate & Chile Sorbet for the annual Mexican Party

We are big fans of Chocolate & Chile here and saw the opportunity to take our recipes to a new level for our annual Mexican party at John’s house. Lately I have been championing Chocolate Sorbet as the new pinnacle of chocolatey frozenness. It is the dark chocolate of the ice cream world, with an intensely dark flavour and smooth, creamy texture. On tasting, people are often surprised to learn it’s actually a sorbet.

Our recipe for a one-gallon freezer is as follows:

The process is simple.

Print

Chocolate & Chile Sorbet

Course Dessert

Cuisine Mexican, Sorbet

Prep Time 30 minutes

Crank Time 20 minutes

Total Time 50 minutes

Servings 4 quarts

Ingredients

• 700 g sugar
• 700 ml water
• 400 g very dark chocolate (4 3.5oz bars)
• 330 g cocoa powder
• 900 ml water
• 5 tsp ground chipotle chile powder

Instructions

1. Start by making the sugar syrup by dissolving 700g sugar into 700ml of water over low heat.

   

2. Meanwhile, slowly melt the dark chocolate (85% cocoa solids) in a double-boiler. I find that it helps to add hot syrup a little at a time to the melting chocolate so you end up with a chocolate syrup. If you add cold liquid to melted chocolate the chocolate hardens quickly into grains and it's hard to get it to melt smoothly again.

   

3. In a large bowl, whisk the cocoa powder with a little of the water until you have a thick paste. Don't add to much water or it will be hard to get the powder into a smooth paste. Once you have a nice runny chocolate syrup and the thick chocolate paste, stir the two together and add the remaining water.

4. Chocolate & Chile are like apple & cinnamon, so I added about 5 teaspoons of ground chipotle chile powder to the mix to get just the right balance of sweetness and heat. Different chile powders have different heat levels so it's best to add a little at a time and find some guinea pigs to test the heat.

   

Needless to say, the Mexican party was pretty crazy. Lots of sombreros and plenty of moustaches going around! We had an insanely fun cranking session with the kids. There were two machines going simultaneously (the other machine had a superb classic vanilla ice cream, that we served with raspberries, oats and whisky in a Cranachan-style).

I think this was the best batch of chocolate & chile yet. The heat was just the right hit-you-in-the-back-of-the-throat balance and the texture was divine. For an intense chocolate-chile-experience, I can think of no match!

The vanilla with cranachan went down well, too.

Note: The first picture in the post is for illustrative purposes only. We did not actually use chilli sauce, nor 7 cans of cocoa powder!