Passion Orange Guava ("POG") Sorbet

Searching for some light amidst the darkness.

At various points last week, the following thoughts crossed my mind:

• Maintaining an ice cream blog in the wake of Trump’s re-election is neither a productive nor skillful use of my energy.

• Spending time making and writing about ice cream at this particular political moment is selfish, hollow, and indicative of a willful naivete.

• Many people are justifiably terrified about what might happen come January, and could therefore give two fucks about ice cream right now.

All of these came to me for good reason. Trump 2.0 is gonna be bad; there’s no getting around that. And none of us can escape our existing political reality by retreating into private passions like ice cream making. Nor should we.

Nevertheless, I plan on continuing this quirky, obscure little project of mine undeterred. Because life is not an either/or. During my time working in the labor movement, I worked with a lot of people who had devoted what seemed like their entire waking lives to class struggle. They embraced Fred Ross Sr.’s axiom that “injustice never takes a vacation” and lived accordingly. Seeing the cost of living that way, I decided I did not want that for myself. Mostly because I couldn’t sustain that kind of pace. But also because I refused to abandon the things that make life enjoyable. Does that make me selfish? Perhaps. But in my view, everyones deserve the nicer things in life. Put another way, we all deserve ice cream!

So I’m gonna continue to make it and share it, despite everything. I’m hoping it might make me feel marginally less bad about the awfulness of where we’re at in America. It probably won’t work, but damn it all to hell: if making some (in this case) sorbet can bring even the tiniest bit of sunshine to the world around me, then it will have been worth the effort.

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This week’s flavor is a Passion Orange Guava sorbet, or “POG” for short. It’s a popular flavor combination in Hawaii, especially on shave ice (apologies if you know all of this already). The tropical island vibes seem tailor-made to put a smile on your face…or my face at any rate. So here goes!

This week’s ingredients. I did not include the persimmons on the far left…though we have a lot of them on the tree in our backyard!

Drawing upon Max Falkowitz’s ratio, I decided to use 3 cups of fruit (in this case nectar and freshly squeezed juice) and 3/4 a cup of sugar (swapping 2 tablespoons of corn syrup for 2 tablespoons of sugar). I also added a 1/4 tsp of guar gum to (hopefully) make the texture more scoopable. As you can see, orange was the only fresh fruit I used. I went with canned nectar for the passionfruit and guava because that seemed easier than using fresh.

For the process, I added all of it to the pot and then heated it slightly until the sugars fully dissolved.

I whisked it for awhile to ensure the guar gum fully incorporated. Did it work? Who knows…

I would have started churning right away, but since I started this around 9pm and was feeling all tuckered out, I put it in the fridge overnight to chill.

I churned it first thing in the morning, around 6:30am. A strange time to churn ice cream:

And the results?

This here is a nice scoop!

Serving up some sorbet for the fam.

Let’s start with the texture: it came out great. Smooth, a bit creamy, and very easy to scoop. This is definitely the best texture I’ve achieved on a sorbet so far, and may well be the best texture of any recipe I’ve made for the blog. Including the guar gum really did wonders for the final product!

In terms of flavor, it was good…but I’m not sure the guava and passion were as strong as they could have been. The orange flavor was the dominant note. It tasted good, but maybe I should have used real fruit instead of nectar? I just couldn’t taste the guava and passionfruit as much as I would have liked.

In addition to the POG flavor balance being off, the taste was a bit overly sweet. My son captured it well when he said: “This is good, but next time dial back the sweetness.” Duly noted!

Next time, I think I’ll take the time to get real guavas and passionfruit and make my own puree. Doing so would be a lot more work, but probably worth it. As for this week’s effort, I’m not sweating it: the mere fact that I was able to make anything after the shitshow of this past week counts as a victory in my book.

As for next week, I’m going to finally make some ube ice cream. I’ve been wanting to make ube for quite some time, and now the moment has arrived. See you then!