Gorgeous greengage sorbet - recipe

Don't these look delicious? I just love greengages, but they never seem to appear in the shops very often, so when I saw a big punnet in Waitrose last week I rushed home with them and turned them into a delicious greengage sorbet. Greengages are a particularly sweet and tasty variety of plum, originally from France and are in season from July until the end of September.

The recipe was inspired by Pim's recent post on greengage jam, with lime substituted for lemon as that was what I had around the place. For sorbet, you don't want them to get too jammy so make sure you cool the mixture before it gets to setting point. I found that this recipe didn't set hard, but was perfectly soft scoop when I got it out of the freezer (must be something to do with the pectin, or the quantity of sugar - can anyone enlighten me?).

Greengage sorbet

1kg greengages (or however many you can get your hands on)
500g caster sugar (or just scale down - you basically want half the weight of the greengages)
Juice of 1 lime

1. Wash the greengages, cut them into halves and discard the stones.
2. Put the greengages, sugar and lime juice into a large saucepan and leave to macerate for half an hour or so.
3. Put the saucepan on a medium heat until the greengages are nicely broken down. Don't let them get too jammy (see above), or you will have jam not sorbet!
4. Push the greengages through a sieve to get rid of the skins.
5. Cool the sieved liquid in the fridge, before churning it in an ice cream maker.

If you don't have an ice cream maker, why not try David Lebovitz's tips for making ice cream without a machine.

There you have it - Gorgeous Greengage Sorbet. Enjoy!

The Princess

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!