Tomato sorbet
A savoury sorbet: raw cherry tomatoes, olive oil and salt. It is the least sweet in the house, and it is served as a starter, not a dessert.
The oil goes in cold, from the very start, along with the water. Pasteurised with everything else it emulsifies into the mix and no longer separates: which is why the sorbet is rich rather than oily.
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 cherry tomatoes, cold, with the mix already at 4 °C, and blended thoroughly.
- ·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
Savoury and silky, the oil giving it a rich sheen that tomato alone does not have. Five grams of sucrose in the entire formula: the other sugars are technical, there to make it servable without sweetening anything.
All about this tomato sorbet
This is an aperitif sorbet, not a dessert. The sugar is there for texture, not sweetness: barely any sucrose, with the bulk supplied by dextrose and 38 DE glucose, which give body and lower the freezing point without sweetening. The result is half the sweetness of an ordinary ice cream.
The salt and the olive oil take it into gazpacho territory. That oil leaves the sorbet with some fat, unusual in a sorbet.
The cherry tomato goes in raw and cold, with the mix already at 4 °C: cooked it would taste of tomato sauce. And one more oddity: this recipe uses a custard stabiliser, not a sorbet one.
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.
Ad links: we link to Amazon. We are not an Amazon affiliate in your market yet, so we earn nothing from these links.
Answers to your questions
Frequently asked questions
Other recipes
you might like
Missing a sugar?
Tick the one you haven't got and which alternatives you do have. We'll tell you whether you can make it with what's there.