A Handful of Blackberries

We planted a runner of a thornless blackberry from a friends garden and this year it has begun to fruit. The blackberries are much bigger than the wild brambles and seemingly much earlier.

I picked the first handful a few days ago and sat them in a pan with a spoonful of sugar just to encourage the juice to run. The next day I simmered the blackberries in their own juice and strained the syrup through a fine stainless steel sieve.  The amount of juice was tiny but very intense. I put it in the fridge and wondered how to make the best of such a tiny amount of juice. I wanted to celebrate these first fruit but realistically I should have waited for a larger crop.

I am trying to reduce the amount of added sugar as I feel it would be healthier and also a lot of sugar tends to reduce the flavour to a general sweetness. Then I had a brilliant idea, blackberry and cabernet sauvignon. I added a large wine glass of some Cabernet Sauvignon wine and another spoonful of sugar and a little applejuice and some water. It tasted like blackberry wine and I put it in the icecream machine. After half an hour it was still not set but beginning to be slushy so I transferred it to the freezer. Two hours later we had it at the end of a lovely summer lunch.

It all went, not surprisingly as there wasn't a lot but it was firm enough to spoon out into balls and although it melted quickly in the hot sun it was a definite success. Not too sweet and with a bit of a boozy buzz.

last of the rose petals

I thought I had seen the last of my beautiful fragrant roses but after thoroughly dead heading the bush it has given me three last flowers.

 I picked them and combined them with lavender flowers and the ubiquitous sugar syrup about one pint of water to half a pint in volume of sugar. I added lemon zest and 3 cardomum pods.

After infusing the flower petals over night I strained the mixture and topped it up with about half a pint of cold earl grey from the teapot. The tea changed the colour quite dramatically . It lost all the mauve blue shades and became a distinct tea colour. More terracotta than a cup of earl grey almost english breakfast.

The resulting sorbet was a few shades paler and had a wonderful flavour . I say had because we have eaten all of it and some people say it was the best yet although the verveine is still a favourite memory. Unfortunately unless the rose has another fling we will have to wait for next year for that particular combination.

Mint Green, Surely you're joking Mrs Childs.

All this lovely ripe fruit that is coming into the markets just keeps producing shades of red sorbets. I am looking for a fresh tasting sorbet that is green, only because I loved the colour of the verveine sorbet.

 I decided to try mint and cucmber with some apple to give it body. Because I know the apple and mint will oxidise as they are cooked I added a bit of bicarbonate of soda as well as some sugar. This helped but didn't really work, it is very hard to get the green that the words "mint green" promise.. I added the sugar at the beginning because I didn't want to have to heat the juice again and because I didn't want to use sugar syrup as it might be too sweet. I did a fair amount of tasting as I wasn't sure quite where I was going with this sorbet. The bicarbonate of soda gave it a very slightly soapy taste which was a bit weird but not unpleasant.

 I let all the mixture sit in a nylon sieve to strain over night in the fridge. The next day I added more fresh mint, salt, pepper and chopped up cucumber to the juice and let it all sit together for a while. The cucumber skins were definitely helping the colour and the taste. I blitzed it for a few seconds and then strained it again. After a guilty look around I am ashamed to say I added a couple of drops of natural green food colouring and popped it in the ice cream machine.

The finished sorbet tastes cucumbery and minty and we actually ate it with some rose petal and some lavender it worked well, the colours were ravishing. I think it would also be great on its own as an amuse-gueule  between courses with a spicy curry.

A strange one but still nice.

It is the unnatural green sorbet at the bottom.

Strawberry sorbet with balsamic vinegar cinnamon and black pepper

The strawberries arrive hot on the heels of cherries in this part of france. We have been picking wild strawberries in the hedgerow for some weeks. I bought a 3 kilo tray of Mara de Bois strawberries in Maurs market  last Thursday.

Pomona Fruits describes Mara de Bois like this:-

This very special perpetual fruiting strawberry is the only variety to combine the aromatic flavour of the wild alpine strawberry with the fruit size and yield of the modern cultivars.  When fully ripe, the medium sized berries are extremely fragrant and develop an intense flavour and aroma similar to the woodland strawberry. Highly sought after by top chefs, if you travel to France and visit the local markets you will see fruits of this wonderful variety on sale when in season.

They are the tastiest strawberry there are and they are quite early. I wanted to make some jam and also try out strawberry sorbet and strawberry ice cream. I bought the cream in the market too.  Huge great dollops of thick yellow local cream, that very quickly gets a tang to it, so you have to get it home to a fridge quickly, but it is amazing.

I sorted through the 3 kilos of strawberries and turned most of them into jam but I kept about 500 gms for sorbet try outs. Strawberry season goes on for quite a while and so I have time to find the perfect combination. I blended half the strawberries with sugar and cream and put them straight into the ice cream maker  where they quickly churned into a delicious smooth icecream.

Personally I thought the flavour got a bit lost in the cream but it all tasted nice and the grand children were much more impressed with this combination than with my tasty sorbets.. 


The other 250 gms I simmered, for a very short time, with sugar, red wine, cinnamon, black pepper and a dash of balsamic vinegar. Once in the ice cream maker it also started to freeze really quickly and this time there was no mistaking  the full flavour of strawberries. It was mouth wateringly intense and delicious.

All food for thought and I find it interesting that the unadulterated strawberries and cream was less convincing and less fresh tasting than the cooked and seasoned strawberries.

Sour little cherries called Griottes

The kitchen has been so full of cherries and jam and juice and I have been so busy keeping everything cooling or boiling that although I didn't forget to make the griottes sorbet I did forget to blog it.

The taste of the griottes is quite sharp and I needed to add sugar to make then palatable. After simmering the griottes that I had prepared earlier ( see Damn Fine Cherry Pie) I strained the cherries and discarded the fruit. I had 500gms of juice so I added 200gms of sugar and cooked it gently until all the sugar had dissolved I tasted it and decided it needed just a bit more sugar and I also added a little lemon juice. This might seem silly as the fruit is so sour already but it is a different sort of sour and I think the lemon enhances the flavour. I poured the mixture into a jug and put it in the fridge to cool. It actually stayed in the fridge for two days and when I poured it into the ice cream maker it looked a lovely bright red colour almost terracotta. The resulting sorbet has a bright clean taste and is both sweet and tart with a touch of damson. I dont recognise a typical cherry flavour at all.

As you can see it turned out bright pink.

Black Cherry and Lime sorbet

While the inner bowl of the icecream maker was freezing for its eight hours I kept toying with the flavours that would enhance a sweet black cherry sorbet. I kept coming back to lime and salt and mint so I looked up black cherry and lime on the internet and there discovered images for dark lacy underwear with vibrant lime trim.

If anyone other than my nearest and dearest reads this blog it will probably be because they searched the internet for something fruity. I hope they wont be disappointed with my tastes of sorbet love.

Nevertheless I thought the combination of sweet and sour would work as a dessert and I really wanted to see if the colour of the purple black cherries would change with acid lime juice. I pureed the cherries to within an inch of their lives and added about 50 grams of sugar to about 150grams of cherry liquid. Then I added the zest and juice of a lime and about half a teaspoon of salt. I blended it all together and left it in the fridge for an hour before pouring it into the icecream maker. I wanted it to taste full and fruity but tart at the same time and I was very happy with the result, especially as the texture is pretty well perfect.

The colour is a deep dark red I think the lime juice has made it more of a cherry red than the dark purply red I was expecting from the cherry skins. 

It is even better with a dollop of thick farm cream.

Damn Fine Cherry Pie

We all went to the cherry fair at St Constant at the weekend, it was the hottest day yet this summer and we had a full beef casserole lunch with potatoes cooked with ceps loads of red wine followed by cherry pie. Boof as we say out here.

There were some lovely cows for auction as well as stalls selling cherries. For the first time I managed to buy some griottes which are small sour wild cherries that everyone wants to use when making jam.

Hours later with black fingers stained by the cherry juice I have 3 kilos of griottes prepared for jam and another bowl full of the best ones to make a sorbet.  I also quickly chopped up and pitted a bowl of lush sweet black cherries and mixed them with half a cup of icing sugar 120mls of milk and 300mls thick farm cream.

It churned up beautifully into a thick creamy mixture and tastes wonderful but I am not sure if I like the texture of all the little bits of cherries. It is however another wonderful colour.

After some rigorous testing we discovered that the icecreams  texture is absolutely fine. However it all tastes better if left to defrost for an hour. It then becomes softer and the cream combines with and envelops the cherries in a very pleasing way.

But it wasn't a sorbet so I will have to get some more black cherries, and in the meantime the best of the girottes are sitting in the fridge washed and pitted.

The disclaimer or why it's not my fault.

I probably should have said that while I am a prolific reader and collector of recipes books, and an internet follower of chefs and cooks and all things cookery, I am a rubbish follower of a recipe. I seem to be completely incapable of following an instruction. I am better with the dash of this, pinch of that, school of cookery. So my sorbet making is led by the smells, tastes and colours of my imagination, heavily influenced I am sure by dishes I have eaten or read about. I am discovering the hard way how to get the perfect texture and as I haven't weighed or measured very much it is difficult to know whether to add or detract ingredients except by tasting, I am good at that.

The second sorbet I made was a pale delicate green, I am so in love with the colours that a bit of freezing produces. I wanted something very clean tasting and refreshing so I confidently boiled up a sugar syrup and added verveine and mint tea a spoonful of green verveine jam that I had bought from a bio (organic) stall and when it was cold a good slug of gin and a little pinch of salt. It was already quite delicious but a bit too sweet so I made some more verveine tea and doubled the quantity thereby reducing the sweetness. I also added a bit more gin, but too much alcohol is not good for sorbets, what I really should have done was infused some juniper berries. Next time.

When it was all chilled I popped half the mixture in the ice cream maker and in half an hour I had a soft green slush to decant into boxes in the freezer. I immediately did the second half and although it worked, it took a long time. I suspect this was because I didn't refreeze the bowl. The end result was a lovely lot of verveine sorbet. Cool, clean and palette cleansing.

Photo courtesy of www.studiolefort.com

The Machine Arrives.

I have bought an ice cream maker, not a very expensive one, it will make about half a litre of ice cream at a time and because the inner bowl needs about 8 hours in the freezer before it is ready to be used, I can only make one batch of deliciousness a day. A good thing too because I am finding it all irresistable.

The story of why I have bought the kitchen gadget that most people leave at the back of the cupboard is all down to our friend Gary Stephens who last year made the most delectable lavender sorbet. I was all ready to bully him into making me my own personal supply when I smelt the rather shabby tumbling roses that had just come into flower in our garden in france. The smell is so intense, a real fresh version of soap, perfume and sweets flavoured with rose water but somehow greener without any sickly connotations. I thought the only way to keep this for ever is to eat it frozen into a sorbet.

I went indoors and ordered an AndrewJames Ice cream maker from Amazon.fr

So the very first sorbet I have ever made was not pale lavender but a violent magenta rose petal slush. after about an hour in the freezer it firmed up and we all enjoyed it and excitedly started picking more bowls of petals.

This is a 5 litre bowl I added some pink rose petals just for the colour because the beautiful scented ones are much paler. 

The next step after picking out the ear wigs and giving all the petals a good shake was to boil up some sugar syrup, about equal quantities of water and granulated sugar. I added some cardomum seeds and scraped a vanilla pod into the pan then roughly peeled in some lemon zest. 

When it was done I tipped the petals in and stirred them around until they had all wilted. They don't look very pretty at this stage but the smell is wonderful. I covered the pan and popped it in the fridge to steep over night and at the same time I made sure all the ice cream maker equipment was ready and chilling down.

The next morning I poured  my pan of pink scent through a strainer and carefully poured it into the ice cream maker. It took about 30 minutes to turn into a slushy vibrant pink mixture and another little while in the freezer to firm but it is so beautiful. In fact I am so proud of it I have decided to keep a blog about my summer of flowers and sorbets and love.

What a colour! The taste is actually quite adult I don't think children will like it so much but I think it is heavenly.