Blueberry Sorbet

UPDATE: We recently made a much better Blueberry Sorbet using wild Scottish Blaeberries.

Last May Big D took me to the Vintner Rooms in Leith for dinner with his mum… That could be interesting enough in itself, but what we’re talking about here is frozen dessert.When it came to the pudding course, I ordered “blueberry vacherin glacé with raspberry coulis”, which the italian guy told me meant blueberry sorbet. I had to see if it lived up to my own skills. While I patiently waited, the waiter prepared “crepes suzette” for Big D’s mother right at our table, slowly caramelizing sugar using a little bit of lemon over an open flame. Quite a little performance indeed. But my blueberry sorbet was yet to come…

Soon I was looking at a small purple cylinder on top of some crunchy meringue (apparently this is what makes it “vacherin”) with a decoration of raspberry sauce (the “coulis”). Suspiciously, I dipped my spoon into the delicate cylinder and lifted a taste to my lips…. A wonderful blueberry flavour in a deliciously smooth sorbet! I could have dispensed with all the extra-fancy-french bits (like the meringue, etc.), which didn’t really do it any favours, but I was suitably impressed.

Of course we intended to make a trip to the highlands in August to gather wild bilberries and make our own sorbet in the hills, but for some reason we never managed to do the trip.

Once the blueberry season was firmly ended, I happened upon this bottle of Blueberry cordial in Good Food.

I’m no expert in sorbet-making, so I thought it might be worth the experiment to see how concentrated juice could work out. So I’ve had this bottle in the cupboard for months, until tonight when we decided to make sorbet on a whim.

The recipe I created was:

• 50cl bottle of Belvoir Farms Organic Blueberry Cordial (containing 230g sugar)
• sugar syrup (350g sugar dissolved into 350ml water)
• enough extra water to bring the density to 18º Baumé

After a good long crank in the wild west, we had it firm enough to eat.

The colour looked great, and the texture was pretty darn good.

But the flavour was kind of a let-down. Rather than that rich fresh blueberry taste I was striving for, it tasted more like… blueberry juice from concentrate. No real surprise really. I guess I just always expect miracles to happen in the White Mountain Freezer while we’re cranking… Lessons learned? Stick to the freshest ingredients, and maybe add some lemon juice to balance out the sweetness in a recipe like this.

So this August you’ll find us out in the hills making the perfect blueberry sorbet.

UPDATE:

The next morning we found that our blueberry sorbet was much better on pancakes. Mmmmm!