Saturday, August 30, 2008

A Solution to an Ancient Problem

The Saga of the Ice Cream Maker continues, this week with dark chocolate sorbet. The recipe comes from David Lebovitz, via Chocolate and Zucchini. Here it is:

550 ml water
2/3 cup packed Dutch process cocoa powder
1 cup sugar

6 ounces of 70% cocoa dark chocolate (this is more than one bar, FYI), chopped

1/2 teaspoon vanilla
pinch of salt

Directions: freeze the bowl for the ice cream maker (or, in our case, turn it on 5 minutes before you churn so it's frozen);

heat the first 3 ingredients in a saucepan until it's sort of boiling (bubbles will rise, and in my case it made a bizarre noise like there were marbles rolling around in the pan), whisking frequently;

Once at the "boil," take it off the heat and stir in the chocolate. Wait 30 seconds or so, then whisk so it all melts in. Lift up your whisk and see, because it will clump on the tip of the whisk and you'll have to bear down and rub it on the pan to get it to melt. Add vanilla and salt, stir;

Cool, then chill, then whisk to mix it again thoroughly, and freeze in your machine. It will stick to the dasher pretty good, so be prepared to scrape it off into your container, then pop it in the freezer to harden.

This tastes ok, but has a weird texture, when frozen but not yet hardened. Once hardened, it tastes like you took a good bar of dark chocolate and made frozen fudge out of it. It's really quite good indeed. Charles ate it as a condiment (!) on a bowl of mint ice cream and he thought that was an excellent use for it.

Of course, taking the photograph above demonstrated to me why people create food blogs. It's because after you take the picture, what are you going to do with that scoop of sorbet?? I mean, it's only an ounce (that's my teensy scoop)...I guess I'll have to...EAT IT!!!!!

So the Ancient Problem of: How do I justify eating dessert for breakfast? is solved.

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