4th of July

Many people were asking me what festive ice cream I was going to be making to celebrate the 4th of July, so I had to make something to combine red, white, and blue. A refreshing frozen treat would also be a nice reprieve from all the heat in Austin - with no sign of letting up. With that in mind, it was time for a raspberry sherbet with blueberry compote topped with a dollop of whipped cream.

Rating: 3 scoops

The sherbet itself was great - as this is a recipe I have made before - but the blueberry mixture seemed a bit icy and smeared all over the place instead of being a nice ribbon throughout that I was hopping for. All in all, not my best attempt and I'd make other combinations first.

This is a standard sherbet made with raspberries. The fresh raspberries at the store didn't look the best and were a tad pricey (close to a pound was needed), so I ended up with frozen raspberries. The challenge with using frozen is that you need to wait for them to be mostly thawed in order to puree them. If you try to puree too early, the blades in the blender spin around without doing much work while if you wait too long, you lose some of the vibrant color and you end up with a "soupy" mixture. I started with raspberries that were still too frozen so it took me more time than I planned to end up with a puree than I wanted. This is not the first time I've had this issue when using frozen fruit to make sherbets, so some more experimentation is needed here.

Raspberries also have a lot of tiny seeds. Look closely in the second picture below and you can see some of the seeds on the side of the bowl. Unfortunately, the viscosity prevented me from straining out the seeds before I added to the base. I ended up diluting the raspberry puree in the rest of the ingredients and was then able to strain out the seeds. Once the seeds were removed, the sherbet came together easily.

I can't remember the last time I made a fruit compote. This jam-like mixture is supposed to stay soft in the freezer and because you boil out some of the water and replace it with sugar, iciness associated with frozen fruit is (supposed to be) eliminated. That was not the case here. Not every bite with compote was icy but there were certain bites that had the distinct icy crunch. Additionally, the compote smeared around in the ice cream instead of being a discrete layer. Both of these issues implied that I didn't boil out enough water. However, there was a little compote left after making the sherbet and it tasted great on top of yogurt!