Blueberry sorbet
Pure blueberry with a hit of lemon: deep purple, fruity and with just the right acidity. One of the sweetest fruits that goes into a sorbet.
Blueberries carry 14 g of sugar per 100 g, nearly twice as much as blackberries. That is why this formula has half the sucrose of the other red-fruit sorbets: copy a blackberry recipe as it stands and the sorbet turns cloying and struggles to set.
Ingredients
For 1 kgTick each ingredient as you get it ready.
Need to adjust the formula?
Step by step
9 steps · follow the order for the best result
Chef's notes
- ·The blueberries go in cold: with the syrup already at 4 °C, never on the way up.
- ·Do not skip the cold ageing: it hydrates proteins and stabiliser and clearly improves the texture.
- ·The serving temperature depends on your recipe: if you formulate to a softer PAC than your freezer (say -11 °C with the chest at -18 °C), temper it for 5–10 min before serving; if the PAC matches your freezer, it can be eaten straight out.
- ·Why formulate at -11 and not at -18 °C: even though your freezer sits at -18 °C, formulating at -11 makes the ice cream tastes better — at -18 it is so cold that the taste buds barely pick up the flavour and the fat is slow to melt in the mouth. And keeps better: ice cream formulated at -11 and kept at -18 has less free water, suffers less from Ostwald ripening (ice crystals joining and growing) and keeps its creaminess longer.
- ·Keep your own notes: write down the POD and PAC that work best with your machine.
The texture
spot on
Fine and very cold in the mouth, with no fat to soften it: that is why the blueberry comes through so clean. The glucose, the main sugar here, keeps the crystal small, and the inulin supplies the body the fruit does not.
Everything about this blueberry sorbet
A sorbet is water, sugar and fruit, and here the fruit is half the recipe. With no fat to give creaminess, all the body has to come from the solids, held up by the sugars and by inulin, a fibre that adds dry matter without sweetening.The blueberry changes the split compared with the other red-fruit sorbets: because it brings so much sugar of its own, the sucrose is cut back and the weight is carried by the 38 DE glucose, which adds solids and antifreeze without raising the sweetness. That split is what avoids the classic home-sorbet fault: the block of ice.The lemon juice is not there for flavour but to lift an acidity the blueberry barely has: without it the sorbet is flat and sweetish. The purée is sieved, added to the syrup already at 4 °C and blended thoroughly. From there it goes straight to age for 12 to 24 h before churning.
The ingredients and what each does
The fruit brings the flavour, the colour and much of the water in the mix. Sucrose and dextrose set the sweetness and the hardness at serving temperature. Glucose adds body and barely sweetens. Inulin adds solids with almost no sweetness, the job milk would do in an ice cream. The stabiliser holds the free water and stops crystals forming in the freezer. Water adjusts the concentration so the flavour is neither watery nor pasty.
Technique and controlling the numbers
Adjusting the POD (sweetening power) and the PAC (antifreezing power, given as a target temperature) lets you match sweetness and hardness to your taste and your machine. With the selectors in the side bar the formula recalculates itself and you will see how the amount of each ingredient changes.
Storage and common mistakes
Store at -18 °C in an airtight container and avoid freeze-thaw cycles. The commonest faults are not ageing it enough, too much sugar so it never freezes properly, and over-churning, which whips in too much air and wrecks the texture.
Recommended for this recipe
Equipment and ingredients that make the difference.
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