Strawberry Sorbet

I love strawberry season. Mostly I love that the price drops about 90% because seemingly everyone and their mother have a few strawberry plants so they just give them away. This strawberry sorbet recipe only has four ingredients, so it makes the perfect summertime treat for everyone.

Strawberry is always a popular flavor in desserts. And I’m not just talking about frozen desserts like strawberry ice cream either. You will often see strawberries garnish baked goods like chocolate lava cake, or baked into pies themselves. The great thing about this strawberry sorbet is just how easy it is to make – so let’s get into it!

What You’ll Need

As with all of my recipes on Scoops of Delight, you need an ice cream machine. The exact style and brand does not matter too much but you do want one that is decent quality. I personally use the Smeg Ice Cream Maker. The only issue with it is that you need to already have a Smeg Stand Mixer – which can be quite pricey. While there are plenty of recipes for no-churn sorbets, I often find a properly churned sorbet magnitudes better.

Some other things you will need for this homemade sorbet recipe are:

• Mixing Bowls
• Wire Whisk
• Steel Pan (I personally find steel the best for making sorbet, but you can use any as long as you are careful about the temperature.
• Rubber Spatula
• Sealable Container (The best thing to use to store homemade sorbet is plastic in my opinion. You want something that is more flat than tall as it provides more surface area to quickly freeze in a home freezer).
• Fine Mesh Sieve
• Blender (I use a stick blender, but you can use a juicer or regular blender as well)
• Kitchen Scale (optional, but recommended as almost all of my recipes use metric as it is more precise than imperial for most home cooks).

What Is Sorbet?

Sorbet is, at its root, flavored frozen water. In fact, sorbet could be considered one of the earliest frozen desserts. In my article A Scoop Through Time: The Complete History of Ice Cream I reference how the ancient Greeks are credited with the invention of sorbet, or as they called it, sorbion. Their mix was snow with honey and fruit juice. Not at all that different than modern sorbet today. Although we do have better manufacturing processes and don’t need to wait for snow.

A major difference between sorbet and ice cream or gelato is that the latter two contain dairy. This has also led to some confusion between sorbet and sherbet. In North America sherbet contains dairy, but in some countries sherbet and sorbet and named interchangeably. Fun fact: the most popular sorbet flavor is lemon!

How To Make Homemade Strawberry Sorbet

This easy strawberry sorbet recipe only requires four ingredients. However one of those ingredients is pectin, which I use as a stabilizer and for better texture. I’m actually a big fan of stabilizers in frozen desserts and do not ascribe to the belief that they are bad. This is a reason why my homemade sorbets exists at the balance between jammy slush and a frozen brick.

Ingredients

500 grams Strawberries (cleaned and de-stemmed)

150 grams Sugar

500 ml Water

3 grams Pectin (powdered)

To begin making strawberry sorbet I like to macerate the fruit. This means simply mixing the cleaned and cut strawberries with sugar, and letting them sit in a bowl for a half hour. This helps pull the juice from the flesh so when you eventually blend and strain you are getting the most strawberry juice you can.

After a half hour add in your water and blend everything up. Strawberries are a great fruit to use in sorbet as they don’t have a lot of fiber like mango or pineapple. So even though we macerate and strain, there really is very little left over.

Pour your blended strawberry liquid through the fine mesh sieve and use a rubber spatula to get all the juice through that you can.

Now it is time to activate the pectin. Pectin works in this recipe because it lowers the freezing temperature, thus making the strawberry sorbet perfect whether one day or one week in your home freezer. Often people find after a few days they just have a solid block of fruit ice; this is why we use stabilizers.

Place your juice in a pan and bring to a simmer. Sprinkle in the pectin and whisk to combine. Let the strawberry mix simmer while whisking for about five minutes. Then move the liquid to a sealable container and place in the fridge to chill.

Churning

After a few hours (or a day) in the fridge you will notice your strawberry sorbet base has gotten thicker. This is due to the pectin. Now your sorbet will churn into a nice, creamy consistency. Just add it to your machine and run according to the instructions. I find 30 minutes in my ice cream maker works perfectly.

When everything is completely churned just scoop it all into a sealable container and pop it in the freezer. I find you can enjoy it straight from the machine at a soft serve consistency, but I love being able to scoop a few balls like a normal ice cream so I usually give it a day in the freezer personally.

Unlike my strawberry ice cream which uses nonpareils or my strawberry rhubarb ice cream which uses candied rhubarb, I find the perfect garnish for strawberry sorbet is just a few sliced up fresh strawberries. In a way this is a very elegant dessert, perfect for dinner parties.

Strawberry Sorbet

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