Continuing in the frozen desserts theme, last night we made sorbet and granita, with tulips to go along with them, acting as cones and sorbet receptacles. We made the granita in groups of four. Granita is kind of like flavored crushed ice. You add water, flavoring and some sugar to a large shallow pan and freeze. After a half hour, you crunch up whatever has frozen into a slush. Re-freeze. Re-crush. You do this four or five times until the whole thing is frozen and crunched up into small icy bits. My team made coffee flavored Granita, which of course was the worst tasting flavor, but it froze better than the pomegranate, chocolate and margarita flavors, so there! We began with the granitas, but as it is a long (albeit simple) process we sampled it last, after it had three hours of freezing and slushing. On to Sorbet.
Though my teammate and I were assigned banana flavored sorbet, we disobeyed. We couldn’t go three days straight making the worst flavors in the class- it’s bad for the moral when no one wants to eat your products. We decided to make grapefruit instead! I worked up the courage and boldly told chef what we decided to do…and he didn’t care. Sure, whatever you like, he said. Triumph! We made our grapefruit sorbet base by mixing grapefruit juice (fresh) with simple syrup for sorbet- water, sugar and sorbet stabilizer or gelatin. Obviously I chose to use sorbet stabilizer, which is basically pectin- you remember Pectin, right? See the Pat De Fruit post if not!
For the citrus flavored sorbet, we also had to add some Swiss meringue (Swiss meringue, not French because it is more stable than French. Not Italian because that takes too long and we were in a rush). This helped add some body to the very watery sorbet base and turned ours from translucent to a pretty pale pink. You churn sorbet the same way you do ice cream- by putting it in that really cool machine!
As some groups base was being churned into sorbet, we made Tulips, which are very thin cookies that are malleable when taken out of the oven and can be used as cones or decoration for plating. Nothing terribly exciting to report about that- I am no better at plating sorbet than I am at ice cream. This sad discovery was made worse by the fact that as we were plating, Chef was coming around with a clipboard grading us-though I’m not sure for what (hopefully for getting along well with others).
And now I will tell you about the best part of class.
Scene: Chef was about half way through churning the class’s Sorbet flavors. He had just finished Orange, so I jumped in there to offer up Grapefruit as the next flavor to be churned. Also around this time, the tulip batters were complete and people were milling about with nothing to do, so Chef decided to give a demo about making the batter into beautiful thin cookies, using stencils and piping bags. Chef had the rapt attention of the class, with the exception of myself. Our sorbet was in the machine with no one to watch it! What to do? Chef said that if it churns too long, it will become rock hard, impossible to extract! So I step up and man the machine myself, testing for doneness and extracting it at precisely the right time. Or, more exactly, a minute or two early due to over eagerness and nerves. Boy, was it fun. As Chef was still busy at the front of the class once our sorbet was done, and the Lemon team wanted to make their base into sorbet, I took the reins again, but even more expertly this time. By the time I had almost completed extracting all of the lemon sorbet, Chef came back and shooed me away. My five (to ten) minutes of fame and glory over, I returned to my mediocre sorbet plating with the knowledge that I need an industrial ice cream maker. Need.
-Sarah, the (self appointed and self imagined) Sorbet Queen
Shout out to Wendy, Naomi, Arielle, Sara, Vive, and Rivky, my Souse Chefs and Soufflé tasters! Also a special thank you to Wendy, who bought the perfect sized ramekins!
YES WE ARE FAMOUS.
ReplyDeleteif you have an ice cream machine on your registry, i shot it.