Creamy strawberry sorbet
Strawberry with a touch of dairy: less sharp than a sorbet and lighter than an ice cream. The middle ground, and it tastes of strawberry.
Adding the fruit frozen is not just convenience: frozen strawberry on a mix at 85 °C does half the cooling, and the sooner the mix comes down, the less cooked flavour it picks up.
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 strawberry goes in frozen, as you take it off the heat: it chills the mix while it works in.
- ·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
Halfway between a sorbet and an ice cream: there is enough strawberry for it to taste of fruit, and the little cream it carries is enough to round the edges. The inulin gives body without adding sweetness and keeps it from turning harsh.
All about this strawberry semi-sorbet
The preliminary prep is what makes this recipe: strawberries halved, vacuum-packed with the sucrose and 24 h in the fridge. The sugar draws the water out of the fruit and moves into it in exchange; then it is all blended and frozen. What reaches the mix is already concentrated strawberry.
It is a sherbet: it carries a little cream and milk powder, just enough to gain a touch of fat and round out the texture without masking the fruit. The solids are held up with the help of inulin.
The sweetness climbs, among the highest, because strawberry is sharp and the cold dulls sweetness on top of that. And the timing is what counts: the strawberry goes in frozen, straight off the heat.
The ingredients and what each does
The fruit brings the flavour. A little cream and milk powder rounds out the texture without turning it into ice cream: fat stays under two per cent. Sucrose and dextrose set the sweetness and the hardness at serving temperature. 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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