Mango Sorbet

Mango Sorbet

“Boy, it’s hot.  This is hot.  It never got this hot in Brooklyn.  It’s like Africa hot.  Tarzan couldn’t take this kind of hot.  I don’t know if I can stay here if it’s going to be this hot.”  Matthew Broderick as Eugene Morris Jerome in Neil Simon’s ”Biloxi Blues”

I don’t know what it’s like in Biloxi now but it’s hot here, damn hot.   We were granted a brief respite when the system that became Tropical Storm Bonnie blew through last week.  The rain thorougly soaked the island, sent boulders crashing down the mountain and tore huge hunks out of the roads.  If you want to go to Cane Garden Bay, I suggest going via Windy Hill.  But all the rain certainly did cool things down, at least temporarily.  Our garden is lush and green, and the cistern is full, good news because it was a fairly dry winter here.

A dry winter might be bad news for those of us who depend on catching rainwater to fill our cisterns, especially when your 12-year-old has discovered the hour-long shower.  But it’s good news for mango-lovers.  Mango trees like a dry spell when they’re flowering, followed by a good dose of wet heat, which means we have some happy mangoes this year.  They’re absolutely stunning this season - sweet, juicy, full of unusually concentrated flavor.  Perfect for a mango sorbet to temper even the stickiest summer day in the tropics.  It tastes like frozen sunshine on a spoon.  And these days you don’t even have to break a sweat or draft an army of eight-year-olds to make sorbet or churn ice cream.  A handy dandy electric model does the job just fine, no ice or rock salt required.

And if  you can’t bear the thought of turning on the stove even to melt a little sugar, try the trick our kids do with the local Julie mangoes.  Fill a bowl with water, ice and some small, over-ripe mangoes and let them chill while you eat dinner. (Supermarket varieties won’t work here, not enough juice.  You need something local and exquisitely ripe).

When you’re ready for dessert, have everyone take a whole mango and squeeze it all over to get it soft and juicy.  Make a little hole at the stem end and suck out the cold, sweet mango juice.  This is a pretty messy treat and best consumed in the company of good friends who don’t mind getting sticky.  Even better, serve to your love.  Who knows where things could go from there? 

Much easier than churning...

Mango Sorbet

If this is too much sorbet for your ice cream maker (as it is for my Cuisinart electric model), no worries.  You can either cut the recipe in half or do what I do and freeze it in batches.  If you do have a Cuisinart, you’ll need to plan a sorbet-making session in advance since the bowl needs at least 24 hours in the freezer before you can use it and the sorbet mixture also needs to be very, very cold when you put it in the machine.

Both the ginger and the rum are optional in this recipe, but do try them.  The ginger adds a spicy little kick and alcohol helps to impede the formation of ice crystals in ice cream and sorbet.   

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 cups water
a 2″ piece of ginger, peeled and sliced
4 cups fresh mango purée
1/2 cup fresh lime juice
a pinch of salt
1/4 cup rum

Put the sugar, water and ginger slices in a sauce pan and set it on the stove over a medium flame.  Heat, stirring, just until the sugar melts.  Remove the pan from the heat and set it aside for half an hour to let the flavor of the ginger infuse the sugar syrup.  Strain to remove the ginger slices and let the syrup cool.

Mix together the ginger syrup, mango purée, lime juice and a pinch of salt (never underestimate the flavor-enhancing power of a pinch of salt).  Cool the sorbet mixture in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight, until it’s very cold.  If you’re in a hurry, you can chill it in the freezer until it’s screaming cold.  But it does have to be extremely cold or it won’t freeze properly (at least in my ice cream maker).

Process the cold sorbet mixture in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.  Add the rum during the last 2 minutes of processing.  (Alcohol lowers the freezing point of the mixture and it won’t freeze properly if you add the rum earlier.)  When it’s finished processing, remove to a suitable container for freezing.  The sorbet will still be quite soft so put it in the freezer for several hours before serving.  Overnight is even better.  Makes about 1 3/4 quarts of sorbet, enough to cool 10-12 fevered brows on a hot summer’s day.

Tagged as: ginger, mango sorbet recipe, rum