Mojito sorbet
Spearmint, lime and white rum: cold, herbaceous and with an edge. The mojito on a spoon.
The mint is blanched and dried before being ground with the sugar. That hit of boiling water fixes the green and slows oxidation: without it, the herb browns and turns bitter in the mix.
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
- ·Mint sugar at 40 °C · lime cold · rum 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
Loose and very soft, because the rum lowers the freezing point and will not let it firm up. The mint refreshes behind and the lime cuts, so it is closer to an alcoholic granita than to a fruit sorbet.
All about this mojito sorbet
The preliminary prep is the heart of it: blanched and dried spearmint ground with the recipe's sucrose until it becomes a green sugar. It is the way to bring in the herb's aroma without bringing in its leaves or its water.
The numbers go out of band on purpose: the sweetness and the serving temperature both run above normal. The rum and the lime juice are to blame. It is a sweet and very soft sorbet, and that is how it comes to resemble the cocktail.
Each thing goes in where it belongs: the mint sugar with the stabiliser at 40 °C, the lime juice cold — acid in the heat brings nothing good — and the rum after the 12 to 24 h of ageing, so the alcohol neither evaporates nor interferes with the ageing.
The ingredients and what each does
The spirit and the fruit bring the flavour. Alcohol doesn't freeze and softens the mix a lot, so the formula balances it with sugars that sweeten without softening too much. Sucrose sets 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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