Raspberry / Cassis Sorbet

As every summer our soft-fruit bushes are producing a bumper crop of berries. Apart from freezing them whole or their pulp to mix into yoghurt, to make a coulis or a desert in winter one delicious way of using them up are sorbets. The following recipe can be done with any soft fruit, but it calls for a bit of flexibility with the sugar syrup and the optional ingredients. Alcohol inhibits freezing and prevents large ice-crystals from forming as does frequent stirring during the freezing process. However, if you want a “granita” you stir less and once the mix is hard, you shave it into the serving dishes.

If you heat the fruit first (without water) or not is a matter of preference with little impact on the flavour, but with tough-skinned fruit like black currants the extraction of the pulp is easier.

What you need

• 500g fruit pulp (I put this through the smoothie extractor, but any food mill that retains the pips will do)
• 150 – 200 g sugar (blackcurrants / cassis are rather tart, so you may increase this amount)
• 250 ml water
• optional for raspberry sorbet:  grated zest and juice of half a lemon
• optional for cassis sorbet: 100 – 200 ml Crème de Cassis liquer (easy to make, see here); reduce the amount of water by the amount of booze...

 

What you do

1. To pulp the fruit use a smoothie maker or a food mill to ensure that pips and skins (cassis) are left behind.
2. Boil the sugar and the water for about 4 minutes into a syrup, leave to cool a bit and mix into the pulp.
3. Add the optional ingredients, the lemon juice and zest for the raspberry, the  Crème de Cassis for the cassis sorbet.
4. Precool either in the fridge or in the deepfreeze.
5. Put in an ice-cream maker, which stirs the mixture and prevents large ice crystals from forming.   
6.  If you haven’t got an ice-cream maker, put the sorbet mixture into the deepfreeze; about every 2 hours use a hand-mixer to keep stirring the increasingly slushy mixture until it is formable with a spoon or a spatula. At this stage it would be ready to serve.

You may freeze it for later, but put it into the fridge at least an hour before serving to allow it to soften. Serve with a sprig of peppermint and a drop of corresponding eau-de-vie or liquer.

My Great-Grandmothers Fruitbake (with Quinces)

My great-grandmother lived near the station of Switzerland’s train hub, Olten, was widowed relatively early, her husband having been a train driver, and clearly wasn’t rolling in money, but loved cooking and enjoyed her food; sometimes when her Grandmother got hungry in the evening, my mum tells me, she had to go to the restaurant next door to buy a litre of “montagner”, the cheapest red wine, to accompany a late night snack of cheese and bread.

The following recipe, which reflects the make-do spirit as well as the love of good food, has been in our family for as long as I can remember, and I have fond memories of coming home, finding this dish on the table, usually for supper, steaming once the crust was broken, but also with the promise of a lovely snack, cold, sometime in the following days, if indeed it survived that long.

The use of steamed fruit of any kind, rhubarb in early summer, plums, apricots and peach a bit later on, apples, pears and quince in autumn, make this a seasonally adaptable dish. In earlier times, steamed fruit would have been preserved in large glass jars and kept for later; we can of course use the fruit we freeze seasonally for later in the year.

What you need

• Steamed fruit (I used quince as we have masses of the this year) to cover the bottom of a ceramic baking dish
• 4 egg yolks
• 200 g sugar
• 250 g ground almonds (optionally substitute a portion of walnuts, I did because we have loads this year)
• 4 egg whites, whisked
• rind of 1 (organic) lemon
• sugar (brown) to sprinkle over the top

What you do

1. Cut the fruit into bite-sized slices or junks, add a bit of lemon juice to prevent browning and sugar to taste, add some water (not enough to cover the fruit) and simmer in a lidded pan until it is still firm, but not hard.
2. Pour a layer of fruit into a buttered baking dish, making sure it is not too watery. (the excess liquid, reduced with a bit of white wine and perhaps additional sugar, makes a good accompanying sauce.
3. Beat the egg yolks and the sugar until they are quite frothy, then add the ground almonds.
4. Grate the rind of one organic lemon over the mixture.
5. Fold in the whisked egg whites, making sure that the mixture remains as light and “fluffy” as possible.
6. Pour the mixture over the steamed fruit and sprinkle lightly with a bit of sugar (I didn't, as you can see, have brown sugar).
7. Bake in the oven at 200° for 35 minutes.

 

 

 

 

Remarks

I had a little Vin Santo, a sweetish Italian wine left, which I poured over the quinces together with the water and the sugar. Once I had taken the fruit out I added the peels, cores and the pips and boiled the syrup for a little longer as these act like a setting agent, making the liquid slightly jelly-like.

 To serve,  heat up the surplus liquid from the steamed fruit to pour over the helpings.

This dish freezes very well, so if you make twice what you need you can easily put another portion in the oven to warm up at a later stage.