Lime and ginger sorbet
Lime and ginger sorbet is just the thing for a swelteringly hot day and limes are now regularly available in my local Cingoli supermarket, hurrah. Remember to choose yellower coloured fruit if possible – it means they’re riper.
Puddings aren’t really my area of interest; I don’t have a sweet tooth and chocolate can hang around in my larder for months, years even. But my Gelato 2000 ice cream maker is a favourite piece of kit. Everyone loves an ice cream or a sorbet and they are so easy to make. For anyone interested in making them, they should consider buying Robin Weir and Caroline Liddell’s book ‘Ices: The Definitive Guide’; it’s my ice cream bible. This recipe isn’t from their book, but I have taken their advice on making simple sugar syrup – dissolve equal quantities of sugar and water, ideally in large quantities as it will keep in the fridge for a week or so. There is no need to boil the syrup. 1 kilo of sugar plus 1 litre of water = 1600ml of syrup.
For this recipe I dissolved 400g of sugar with 400ml of water to create about 700ml of syrup.
- 700ml of still warm syrup
- 3 teaspoons of grated fresh ginger
- juice of 7 limes
- juice of 1 lemon
- zest of 1 lime
Stir the grated ginger into the warm syrup and leave to cool to room temperature. Add the juice of the limes and lemon, give the syrup a good stir, and then place it in a refrigerator for a good 4 hours or so until thoroughly chilled. Taste the mixture. It should be quite intense – if not, add more lime or ginger according to the dictates of your palate. Remember the flavour will become less pronounced once it is frozen.
Strain the syrup to get rid of the ginger paste. Add the lime zest (I think it looks pretty, as well as adding flavour). If you’ve got an ice cream maker you’ll know what to do next. If not, you will have to make the sorbet manually. This will result in a more granita-textured sorbet (ie bigger crystals) but it will still taste wonderful.
Pour the liquid into a couple of metal ice trays or a metal bowl. Place them carefully in the freezer. After 30 minutes, remove from the freezer and stir and mash the mixture with a fork; repeat this until the ice has nearly frozen, stiffer than slush puppy but not solid is the texture you are looking for if you want to eat it there and then. Otherwise decant the sorbet into a lidded container and freeze it until you are ready to serve, remembering to remove sorbet from the freezer about 20 minutes beforehand to allow it to soften up a little.