Cranberry sauce sorbet (sauce-bet!)

I must admit this was a bit of an experiment, but luckily for me (and the BF) it was a successful one second time around! Inspired by my latest book purchase, McGee on Food & Cooking, and being prematurely in the Christmas spirit but not quite ready for cranberry sauce, I decided to try and make some cranberry sorbet instead.

McGee's is a fabulous book, especially for geeky science types like me. It doesn't contain a single recipe but it does tell you absolutely everything you could ever want to know about every ingredient and cooking technique you could think of. Heston Blumenthal is apparently a huge fan.

Sorbet, according to McGee, is simply a frozen mixture of fruit juice or puree, 25-35% sugar and 0.5% acid. I ended up plumping for a fairly heavy sugar content as cranberries can sometimes be on the sour side. They also need diluting with water - my first attempt was more like cranberry sauce-bet and the BF couldn’t eat it! However, his pain is your gain and here is the successful end product:

Ingredients

300g fresh cranberries
300g sugar
2 tblsps orange juice
600ml water

1. Put the cranberries and water into a heavy based pan and cook until the cranberries have broken down. Sieve out the skins to leave a diluted puree.

2. Return the puree to the pan with the sugar and orange juice. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 20 minutes. Be careful, it can (and did in my case) burn!

3. Pour into a container and freeze for four hours or so. Simple!