Grapefruit Sorbet

Has anyone noticed that summer seems to have arrived? We've been really enjoying the beautiful warm and sunny days with dinners outside, long evenings pottering in the garden and a bit of hard work finishing off our dining table. Naturally that's left us reaching for the ice cream. As our supplies dwindled my thoughts turned to a book we'd picked up for a couple of quid last summer; maybe prices were low because no one was making ice-cream in the wet excuse for a summer that we had last year?

Ices Italia takes you through recipe after recipe of sorbets and ice-creams almost all of which are mouthwatering (I'm yet to be convinced that there is a place in this world for pesto sorbet. Anyone else agree?). I just couldn't resist! I found three grapefruit's in the reduced section of our local supermarket and picked up a tub of value strawberries (because at this time of the year even value strawberries are British, ripe and juicy).

We had every intention of doing this the hard way, and saved the ingredients until the weekend so the whole thing could be given a beating every hour or so. But then we caved. We (and Joe in particular) have a penchant for gadgets - and kitchen gadgets are no exception. We bought an ice-cream maker. I'm not sure where we're going to put it, but I'm sure we'll find a hole somewhere!

The Strawberry Gelato recipe came straight out of Ices Italia, so rather than abusing their copyright I'll just pop up some pictures of the process. It tastes brilliant - exactly what I'd hoped for. Just like strawberries!

Make a custard

Add strawberry puree

Mix them together

Play with a new toy

One strawberry gelato. Mmm mmm!

.... but Grapefruit Sorbet was absent from the book and since we both adapted the lemon sorbet recipe and cobbled it together with a few internet finds I have no qualms in sharing this one with you. I'm pleased with the refreshing sharp yet sweet flavour produced. As the ice-cream maker was already in use (and requires 24 hours of freezing between uses), we did actually do this properly, so I'll include that in the recipe too.

250ml water
150g caster sugar
zest and juice of 3 grapefruits (about 300ml of juice)

1. Put a freezer proof bowl in the freezer.

2. Put the water, sugar and zest in a saucepan and gently heat until the sugar is dissolved. Pour into a bowl and leave to cool.

3. Juice the grapefruits.

4. Sieve the water, sugar, zest mixture and the grapefruit juice into the frozen bowl. Stir. Put it all back into the freezer.

5. After an hour scrape any frozen crystals from the bowl into the middle and give the whole thing a quick beat. Repeat ever half hour or so until the whole mixture is a slurry rather than a liquid. Transfer to a food processor or use a hand blender to blitz the mixture.

6. Put back in the freezer and leave to finish freezing.


Roll on the rest of summer!