Passionfruit Sorbet
We spent our wedding anniversary in the Mayan Riviera this year and on site at our resort was an ice cream parlor that just happened to be en route to the buffet, or the beach, or the botanical gardens, or anywhere I happened to be wandering for no apparent reason. Go figure. Since the weather is so hot and humid, things like ice cream and whipped cream need a lot of stabilizers to keep from melting instantly outside of an air conditioned room. This doesn’t really make for the best quality ice cream, tasting more like the dixie cups I ate with a wooden spoon as a child.
That didn’t stop me from visiting on a near-daily basis — ice cream is still ice cream when it’s 40 degrees outside — and one flavor in particular really stood out. It was labelled differently on several different occasions, but whatever miscellaneous blend of tropical fruits made up the sorbet, it was always swirled with creamy vanilla ice cream to offset it. I vowed that, come ice cream season, we would try something similar at home.
So this is my attempt at doing this. I bought a box of Ceres passionfruit juice but, unfortunately, it is mostly pear in flavor and does not quite have the tart bite I was hoping for to counteract the creamy and sweet. Still, this was my first attempt ever making a sorbet and it turned out surprisingly well, with a bit of lemon juice to try and pick up what the pear juice lacked and some vodka to keep the ice crystals small (the flavor is hardly noticeable). The remnant of the bottle mysteriously vanished into tonic water before the sorbet had even set.
I made a half batch of a very basic vanilla bean ice cream and we did swirl in some of the sorbet and it is delicious, but the color of the sorbet is not a particularly stunning contrast. Instead, these things will be featured separately to avoid confusion as to why the sorbet looks like a frozen custard. All ice creams kind of look the same with my lack of photography skills, props and lighting anyway, but… here you are! Great recipes regardless.
- 2 1/2 cups passionfruit juice
- 1/2 cup sugar
- juice of 1 lemon
- 1 ounce vodka
- pinch of salt
- Combine the fruit juice, sugar and lemon in a saucepan over medium heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved.
- Remove from the heat, stir in the vodka and a pinch of salt. Transfer to a bowl, cover and refrigerate until completely chilled.
- Prepare the mixture in your ice cream maker, then transfer to an appropriate freezing receptacle.
Note: hold off on the sugar at first if your juice is pre-sweetened instead of fresh, as sweetness intensifies when frozen. Taste, and add as necessary. Do not omit the vodka, or the sorbet may turn granular and icy once frozen.
If you wish to make the vanilla ice cream to swirl with the passionfruit, here is the recipe for that as well:
- 1 cup whole milk
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 1 vanilla bean, split in half and seeds scraped
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 4 egg yolks
- pinch of salt
- Combine the milk, cream, vanilla and sugar in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir until the sugar is dissolved and the mixture starts to steam.
- In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks and salt until light and homogenous. Add a few tablespoons of the hot milk and stir vigorously. Incorporate the rest of the milk, little by little, to temper the eggs and prevent them from curdling.
- Return the mixture to the saucepan and cook, stirring often, until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.
- Remove the vanilla pod and strain through a sieve into a bowl, then cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until completely chilled.
- Prepare the custard in your ice cream maker.
To assemble the two flavors together: Remove the sorbet from the freezer. Find another, larger freezer container and either make alternating layers of sorbet and vanilla ice cream, while it is still soft, or pour all the vanilla ice cream into the container, plop a few pieces of the sorbet on top and streak it through the soft custard with a knife or chopstick. Freeze this all together for a layered/swirled, two tone flavor explosion! It’s basically like a reverse creamsicle, which is brilliant, if you ask me. You will definitely have more sorbet than custard afterward. Life is just unfair sometimes. What to do, what to do…