Gazpacho sorbet
Homemade gazpacho turned into sorbet: tomato, cucumber, pepper and garlic, with the vinegar out in front. A starter, not a dessert.
All the raw vegetables go in last for the same reason nothing is cooked in a gazpacho: heat kills the freshness. Only the third of the tomato that carries the pasteurising passes through 85 °C.
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
- ·Tomato split: 1/3 hot · 2/3 + raw vegetables cold. And it is strained after ageing.
- ·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
Cold, loose and savoury: it has barely any sugar, only enough to stop it turning into a block. The blended vegetables give the body and the salt carries it into appetiser territory rather than dessert.
All about this gazpacho sorbet
This is a savoury sorbet: low sweetness and plenty of salt, with very little sucrose. The sugar that is there — dextrose and 38 DE glucose — is for texture, not sweetness: it is what lowers the freezing point and prevents a block of ice.
And it carries olive oil, which leaves the sorbet with some fat. Little for an ice cream and a great deal for a sorbet, but it is what gives the richness of a well-emulsified gazpacho.
The tomato is blended and passed through a fine sieve until you have the amount the recipe calls for. One third is heated with the water, the oil, the vinegar and the sugars; the remaining two thirds, plus the cucumber, pepper, garlic and cumin, go in with the mix already cold. After ageing, it is strained.
The ingredients and what each does
The vegetables bring the flavour and almost all the water. Olive oil adds the little fat there is and salt sets the savoury note, which is why sweetness is lower than in a fruit sorbet. 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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