Chocolate Month, Week 4 - Chocolate Sorbet
Closing out Chocolate Month with a simple chocolate sorbet.
I’ve spent considerable time in Canva over the past two weeks (usually post 9pm) putting together the bracket for the upcoming Tournament of Ice Cream. While I utterly lack an eye for design, I must say, I do like the way it’s coming together! Here’s a small preview:
I’m hoping to reveal the full thing on Sunday evening, in true March Madness, Selection Sunday-style. For those of you who submitted the name of a pint into the Tournament, check back on Sunday to see which pint your pint is matched up against in the first round. And for those who volunteered to judge a round, stay tuned for your judging assignment—I’ll contact you directly. As I said two weeks ago, it’s gonna be fun!
As for this week, we’re bidding farewell to Chocolate Month. I feel like this little exercise has already accomplished what I wanted it to, namely—leveling up my chocolate ice cream-making skills. While there are still many chocolate ice cream recipes out there to test, I decided to go with a sorbet this week. Chocolate sorbet is a popular flavor choice, and I want the blog to be friendly to my non-dairy friends out there.
I did some sleuthing to find the best chocolate sorbet recipe, and it turns out most people on the interwebs recommend David Lebovitz’s recipe, which comes from The Perfect Scoop. I decided to follow his recipe to a T this week—no adding corn syrup or any stabilizer shenanigans. But then again, the recipe calls for bittersweet chocolate, and since I couldn’t find any at Safeway, I used semi-sweet. 😬
The recipe is very simple. You have four main ingredients—water, sugar, cocoa powder, and bittersweet chocolate—plus a small amount of vanilla extract and salt.
The recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar, 2 and 1/4 cups of water, 3/4 cup of cocoa powder, 6 ounces bittersweet chocolate (again, I used semi-sweet), 1/2 tsp vanilla extract, and a pinch of salt. You combine all of these ingredients over some heat while whisking, and voilà, you have a chocolate sorbet base.
Clockwise from top left: sugar and salt, cocoa powder, 1.5 cups of water, chopped chocolate, whisk until smooth, and then immersion blend to ensure full homogenization.
I let it chill in the fridge for about four hours before churning.
The texture looked pretty good coming out of the machine. But would the final results satisfy or would they disappoint?
Apart from being a bit too sweet, the results did not disappoint. The texture was excellent—and surprisingly creamy—and the chocolate flavor was rich and satisfying. The only issue, as I already indicated, is that it was a bit too sweet, which can be directly attributed to the semi-sweet chocolate I used in place of bittersweet chocolate. Oh well, dems the brakes I guess. Overall, I would call this effort mostly successful, and I would definitely make it again. Great job David Lebovitz!
Okay, I’m going to end this here because I need to save my energy for next week, which is gonna be a doozy: a batch of homemade ice cream + a couple of first round matchups in the Tournament of Ice Cream. See you then!