Pink Grapefruit & Aperol Sorbet

A palest pink, melt in your mouth, summer sorbet.

This pink sorbet has a pleasant mouth puckering tartness about it. Its perfect as a posh palate cleanser between courses or to cool down with on a hot sunny day. The recipe is a cinch once you have conquered the hot sugar syrup fear factor of the Italian Meringue. I love it because it positively does not need any fancy ice cream machines to be just perfect. And because the egg white is cooked…its very safe too. Basically the trick is to incorporate a fluffy stable meringue cloud into your sorbet base (or your sorbet base into the meringue). The air in the meringue creates a lightness in the sorbet that makes a scoopable end product – so no need for an ice cream machine.

I have always loved Campari and now we have Aperol which is its less alcoholic and more orangey coloured cousin. Aperol contains among other things bitter orange, gentian, rhubarb and cinchona (from which quinine is extracted).

Ingredients

1 quantity of Italian meringue made with 4 egg whites

600ml of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice (I sieved mine but if your juice is pulpy thats fine)

100ml of Aperol (actually i did add some extra because I really love all things bitter like tonic water, Campari, tonic water and Campari and now Aperol… so I probably got to 150ml ish)

No extra sugar required because the sugar is already in the meringue and I dont like oversweet ices

Gadgets & Gizmos

To make the meringue you do need an electric whisk and preferably a food mixer such as a Kenwood or a Kitchen Aid because that frees your hands to pour in the syrup. No ice cream maker necessary and in fact dont put this mix through one as it will simply knock the air out of it.

How To

In a large bowl gently fold in the meringue to your juice and Aperol taking care not to knock all the air out of the meringue.

When its pretty well incorporated put it in the freezer.

Check after a couple of hours (this freezes quite slowly as there is some alcohol in the Aperol ) and this is important because this is really a liquid sorbet base and its almost certainly going to separate out a bit from the meringue – thats fine. As it freezes its easier to mix it together – use a fork. I did this a couple of times and the end result was a homogenous nicely incorporated sorbet.

You Are What You Eat

Its hardly going to be one of your five a day and freezing the fresh juice diminishes the Vitamin C. If the “Cinchona” contains some active quinine then consider it an anti malarial!

Improvs and Ideas

All manner of citrus type concoctions can be made according to the same basic recipe. Other bittery drinks such as Campari, home made sloe gin, limoncello etc deserve being made into sorbets too.

Mellow Yellow Gazpacho

Superfood smoothies

Of course the Spanish have been making turbo charged superfood smoothies for centuries, its just that classic Gazpacho made in summer from sun ripened vegetables in sleepy Andalucian villages seems less headline grabbing than kale, spirulina and avocado smoothies made by people practicing yoga poses before breakfast in California. I joke of course……I love my kale smoothies……

“Gazpacho is indeed one of “the” dishes of summer. On a sweltering day in those whitewashed hilltop towns sipping a glass of this salady gloop saves a great deal of energy. No need to sweat cutting up a salad and chewing through vegetables and your other hand is free to hold a glass of something very cold indeed – preferably a Manzanilla or Fino. If those delectable drinks are not to hand then because a good gazpacho is fairly sweet (and don’t please even think about making this recipe with anything other than over ripe probably splitting in their skins sun ripened tomatoes) then a fruity ripe white or rosé is best. I’ve been enjoying with the Catleya Rosé and the Caloian White (yes) Zinfandel.

In this “mellow yellow” version the tomatoes used are yellow ones which makes for a showstopper iridescent blast of colour whether you serve in regular serving sizes (I like to serve in wine glasses or nice tumblers with a drizzle of something on top) or as pictured here in little shot glasses with a blob of pesto in the centre for a party. This is one of those recipes where the quantities are for guidance. If you see good things in the market that are screaming at you “we are ripe” then scoop them up and use them! Your gazpacho will taste infinitely better than following recipe quantities slavishly with not quite ripe ingredients.

You Are What You Eat

Tomatoes contain all four major carotenoids: alpha- and beta-carotene, lutein, and lycopene which apparently are even better for you in a group than individually. They contain inordinate amounts of the king of carotenoids “lycopene”thought to have the highest antioxidant activity of all. So far so good… add to this mix the raw onions and you can weep for joy because those tear jerking sulphur compounds ensure that your blood clots less easily and contains less cholesterol and triglycerides. The olive oil and all that oleic acid just further makes this a shot of something very very good indeed.

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Beer Sourdough with Wild Garlic Salt Crust

why use water in breadmaking when you can use real beer?

Making sourdough bread (“paine facuta cu maia”) fills people with dread with talk of petulant starters, the best “hydration” levels, steam in the oven, crumb texture and crust and so on and so on…. If you like all this uber science (and sometimes we all need to access our inner nerd) a good read is here at The Fresh Loaf or my much thumbed Dan Lepard’s “The Handmade Loaf”. But all this exalted highfalutin talk, whilst enlightening kind of misses a basic point: that people were making bread from natural home made yeasts for centuries before modern yeast as we know it was first commercially produced in the nineteenth century and they didn’t have food blogs or star artisanal bakers to show them how.

So why not have a go at baking like your grandmother: get your hands sticky and have a go with your flour, your starter, your oven and be sensitive to the weather on the day you bake. Its never going to be a disaster and you are going to have a whole load of self satisfying fun. Now for the purists adding beer to sourdough probably isn’t right – for a start the beer gives the bread a nutty sweet smell that is not entirely sour. But what it does do, and you really need the unpasteurised good stuff for this, is add its own yeasts and enzymes. And so your sourdough bread which might be a bit sluggish at rising if you are not entirely used to it, is probably going to rise more easily and be lighter. I’ve used the Zaganu “Bere Bruna” here which is unfiltered and unpasteurised and therefore a living product that helps the bread develop and adds its own flavour too.

You Are What You Eat

Bread has been part of our diet for 30,000 years. It does not make you fat but it has suffered at the hands of the misinformed and popularist faddy diets. Bread and in particular wholemeal bread is an important source of B vitamins (thiamin, niacin and folate) and minerals (Iron, zinc and magnesium) and while being mainly a source of our daily carbohydrate it does also contain protein. It contains only traces of fat. Wholemeal bread, particularly that made with rye flour and enriched with seeds and nuts can help regularise blood sugar. 100g of bread which is approximately two chunky slices depending on the density of your bread contains 266 calories.

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