For local experts, delectable sorbet is both simple and challenging
For local iced-treat experts, delectable sorbet is simple and challenging
People are rarely excited for sorbet. They all scream for ice cream, go crazy over frozen custard and lose all self-control over gelato, but sorbet is often an afterthought, a usually too sweet consolation prize for the dieting or the lactose-intolerant. Sometimes lemon sorbet is served between courses at fine-dining restaurants to cleanse the palate like a frozen version of soda water.
And apart from the heavy dose of sugar involved, it is the more theoretically virtuous of the iced treats. Ice cream is made with milk, eggs and cream, gelato is made with only milk, and sorbet has no dairy or eggs at all. There is also a thing called sherbet (aka sherbert) that is made with fruit juice and some low-fat milk, but it is not terribly trendy, so good luck finding an organic version. And while ice cream is perennial and gelato is like ice cream’s slightly more virtuous (but still desirable) foreign cousin, sorbet often gets left out in the cold. This is wrongheaded. To see why, stop by the popular downtown gelateria and coffee shop, Ecco (128 E. Marcy St.), where they often serve four to five sorbets at a time. Ecco has about 50 sorbet flavors in the recipe bank. And while many underwhelming commercial sorbets are made from fruit juice concentrate or blended fruit mixes and thickeners, Ecco makes its sorbets from scratch, so in most cases the ingredient list is short: fruit, sugar, water. Repeat.
“The flavors that tend to come out best are fruits,” says Ecco owner Matt Durkovich. “You’ll see a lot of fruits out of us in the summer, as well as exotic things like chocolate, root beer, lavender, lemon.”
Root beer makes sense — what is soda, after all, but a form of melted sorbet? Though Durkovich adds that when making a sorbet out of soda, it’s best to let the soda go flat, because if frozen with carbonation, the carbonation will leak out and break down the sorbet. Ecco does the same with the sparkling wine in its Champagne-orange flavor.
In fact, achieving the proper texture for a sorbet can be a delicate balance — too little sugar and it gets too hard, too much and it won’t freeze.
“Sorbets are trickier than gelato or ice cream,” Durkovich says. “Water freezes firmer than milk and fat. You’ve got a lot of play room with milk and fat.”
At Kakawa (1050 Paseo de Peralta), where fresh, housemade fruit sorbets are served alongside its housemade chocolates and ice creams, assistant manager/sorbet wrangler Lizzie De Santis adds an additional ingredient to keep the texture of their sorbet soft but still frozen — a tablespoon of vodka.
“Everything we make is fresh and preservative free,” De Santis says. “We’re not buying juices or anything like that. It’s all from fresh fruit. We don’t put any enhancers in, like xanthan gum or root powders or gelatin or agaragar — all of those go to texture, but if you use fresh product and balance your sugar-to-liquid ratio, that is where your texture lies rather than having to rely on other additives.”
Making sorbet is simple — you take the fruit, you purée the fruit, you add in the sugar (or honey or agave syrup — Kakawa’s sorbets have used both in addition to regular sugar), you put it in an ice cream machine, and you churn. Kakawa serves sorbet seasonally and takes advantage of local produce.
“We’ve done strawberry made with fresh strawberries, apricot with apricots from my garden, we did an apricot cardamom, prickly pear, passion fruit — we’ll normally have one or two different flavors of sorbet rotating,” says general manager Jelly Chavez. “I think we’re going to do a prickly pear for next week.”
But to really taste sorbet pushed to its limits, head over to gastropub Fire & Hops (222 N. Guadalupe St.) or La Lecheria ice cream parlor (1708 Lena St.), where chef/ owner Joel Coleman uses his adventurous palate to kick the concept of sorbet up a notch. Coleman typically beta tests his more exotic flavors at Fire & Hops, where sorbets such as mango-coconut with cardamom and roasted white chocolate with miso have been featured on the dessert menu.
Coleman doesn’t shy away from fruit — La Lecheria, which always has at least one sorbet by the scoop and one in pints, has recently featured a melon red chile sorbet with red chile and cantaloupe, a “coconana” with banana, chocolate and coconut that Coleman describes as “tasting like your morning smoothie,” and even jackfruit sorbet this week. Coleman had trouble procuring the jackfruit — now he knows why.
“I guess it’s all over social media — jackfruit’s the new super food,” Coleman says.
La Lecheria also has a divine coconut miso sorbet which, much like the white chocolate with miso from the Fire & Hops menu, tastes and feels more like an ice cream than a sorbet.
“The best thing you can do to make a really good sorbet is have some kind of fat in it,” Coleman says. “Whether it’s the fat from white chocolate or the fat from coconut milk.” Mangos, he adds, work well to provide a creamy texture, as do bananas, as does avocado.
Coleman also will sometimes use a touch of liqueur for texture.
“I made a sorbet with some Campari; any kind of liqueur is great, maybe Cynar [artichoke liqueur],” he says. “It doesn’t impart much flavor, but you’re helping with the texture.” He also has made a refreshing mango sorbet with white wine, and a cranberry sorbet with Campari and/or Aperol (for Thanksgiving).
And to really nail that all-important iced cream-free creaminess, one can always get a bit more scientific. Both La Lecheria and Kakawa use a refractometer, a device that uses light refraction to measure the density of liquid, to check the sugar content of their sorbet.
“Sometimes you have no fat, so you really need the refractometer,” Coleman says. “You want it to be about 25 to 30 percent sugar. Too much sugar won’t freeze right or freeze at all; not enough sugar will freeze too hard.”
Far from the cloying frozen juice many of us grew up with, these local sorbets prove that you can have your frozen iced treat and eat it, too, whatever your flavor preference, from the simplest local fruit to the most intrepid savory concoction. Although for kids, the choice is often simple.
“Kids like red flavor,” Durkovich says. “It could be Tabasco — if it’s red, they’re going to pick red. Kids under 6, they choose by color.”