Plum and Blueberry Sorbet

Plum and Blueberry Sorbet

Its summer, our plum tree is bearing lots of fruits and we have leftover blueberries! That’s a perfect ingredient for a sorbet but I don’t have an ice cream maker so I have to do this manually. For those who do not know what a sorbet is, it’s a frozen desert made out of sweetened fruit juice puree with a hint of liqueur.

This wonderful dessert was invented one day when a Roman Emperor named Nero was having a banquet and asked his workers to manually pass buckets of snow from the Appian Way as they will be mixing it with honey and wine, this happened in between the years 54 to 68. 1500 years later it had a comeback when
Catherine de’ Medici of Italy brought this iced dessert to France. Then a further 100 years later it became popular in the streets of Paris and started to become popular as well in England and the rest of Europe, the rest is history.

This wonderful dessert should not be confused with Granita or Sherbet as they are totally different things. All of them are made out of pureed fruit but Granita is more like shaved ice, Sherbet is whipped ice but contains butterfat which is not more than 2% and Sorbet is in the middle where it contains no butterfat but it is whipped making it lighter than granita as the ice crystals are aerated.

So for those who are lucky and have ice cream makers this would be a breeze as after you blend all the ingredients you just need to dump it in you ice cream machines and 25 minutes later you can enjoy a lovely sorbet but for me it’s a manual process that I have to keep on whipping the mixture every 30 minutes until I get the desired aerated effect.

Ingredients

2 cups plums, skin and pits removed
1 cup fresh blueberries
1 juice of orange
1/4 cup honey
3 tbsp sugar
Pinch of salt
2 tbsp of cognac (alcohol will prevent it to totally freeze)

Method

1. Add all ingredients except for the cognac in a blender, blend for 4 minutes or until it’s totally smooth.
2. Pour mixture in a wide rectangular container (the bigger the surface area the better so it freezes faster), then mix in the cognac. Place it in a freezer.
3. Remove from freezer after 30 minutes and whip the mixture, place back in the freezer for another 30 minutes. Repeat this process for at least 6 times or until the mixture is properly aerated.