A Rainbow of Sorbet

I had a few blonde moments today at school. I burned myself, I tried to help others not break the $3000 ice cream maker, I helped ruin a tulip cookie mold, and I ate a lot of frozen fruit desserts. I'm sorry to tell you that it wasn't an extremely riveting day at school but I will do my best to make it as amusing as I can.

The first thing that we made today was an delicious and refreshing granita. Granita is basically a fruit syrup that you freeze in a shallow dish and shave periodically as it hardens in the fridge so that small ice crystals develop and made a slurpee-like texture (actually, it is a little flakier than a slurpee but it was the closet textural thing I could think of). All we did was bring sugar and water to a boil and then add pomegranate juice (though you could really add anything) and let that boil with the sugar and water and then we froze it in a 9 by 13 inch pan, scraping the surface every half an hour or so until the consistency was jussst right. Then we ate it. It was quite tasty and so easy. It would be a lovely thing to make in the summer when it is hot, hot, hot.

On Friday we made a simple syrup (water and sugar brought to a boil) for our sorbets today and we cooled it over the weekend. As a result, the sorbets that we made today came together extremely quickly. At my school, we use this brand of fruit puree called boiron (not sure if I spelt it write but that's how it sounds when you say it) and basically, it is fruit pureed with sugar and it cuts your work as a pastry cook down to almost nothing to prepare something like a sorbet. Had I not had the puree, I would have had to clean and trim and cut the strawberries (that was our flavour by the way), then I would need to cook them with sugar until they broke down and the sugar dissolved. Then I would have to cool them and push them through a fine mesh sieve in order to get rid of the seeds and then I would be ready to make sorbet. Time wise, the pre-made puree helps, a lot. All my team had to do was mix the fruit puree with the sugar syrup and some lemon juice and then put it in the ice cream compressor. Simple and really, really good.


Sorry for the terrible picture, I just wanted y'all to see the beautiful colors of the sorbets. The really yellow one is mango, the really bright pink is raspberry, the light pink one is strawberry and the pale yellow one is passion fruit. In the distance you can see the granitas -- look really boring, don't they?! But...they do taste great!

The last thing we made was a total disaster. They were called tulip cookies and they were meant to serve as baskets and decorations for our sorbets and while they were easy to make batter wise, they actual shaping and baking and forming of them was totally hopeless. The batter is a very spreadable consistency and whether you use a stencil or not, you need to use an off-set spatula to spread the batter. It is not easy because you don't really have any idea of how thick to spread your batter and you also, sometimes, have blonde moments and leave the stencil on the pan when you put your cookies in the oven. When this happens, you laugh and your chef laughs and you throw out the 25 cent stencil and move on...until you do it again. Almost. Seriously, I don't know where my brain was but I got almost to the oven before I figured it out and saved the stencil. However, the fun doesn't end there because once baked, the cookies need to be shaped ASAP. Seriously, you have about one minute to shape all the cookies before they cool too much to bend and then you just deal. The cookies are super hot too; I mean, I burnt my finger on the oven today but I could have easily done it with the cookies too. You try your best to shape them in ladles or cups but they are rather unwieldy and rather tricky. Unfortunately, we didn't really get too many nice cookies out of the deal but I guess you just laugh that off and start over tomorrow.