Just as with ice cream, the glorious thing about homemade sorbet is that you can make flavors you could never buy. And the texture is so much better, too: smoother, richer, without all that icy brittleness. This sorbet is intentionally slushier still: a sluicing with Cointreau adds an orangey depth and keeps it all from freezing solid.
If you're not using an ice cream maker, then just pour the sugary fruit puree into a plastic container and whip it out of the freezer and mush it up in a processor a couple of times while it freezes.
Ingredients:
1 1/2 pints red currants
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
Zest and juice of 1 orange
1/3 cup Cointreau
Instructions:
-Preheat the oven to 350 F.
-Put the red currants, stalks and all, into an ovenproof dish and add the sugar and zest and juice of the orange.
-Cover with foil and put in the oven for about 45 minutes, by which time the fruit will have become soft and pulpy.
-Let the fruit cool before pushing the mixture through a mouli or other food mill, or puree it in a blender or food processor. The advantage of a food mill, though, is that it purees and sieves at the same time. A blended or blitzed mixture will have to be pushed through a sieve to remove all the seedy stalky bits. Either way, make sure you use all the syrupy juice the red currants have made as well, and then stir in the Cointreau.
-Put the sorbet mixture into an ice cream maker to freeze and then decant this vivid puce slush into an airtight container and keep in the freezer until the actual point of serving.
Serves 6.
Excerpted from Nigella Fresh by Nigella Lawson. Copyright 2010 by Nigella Lawson. Published in the U.S. by Hyperion. All Rights Reserved. Available wherever books are sold.
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