Sorbet Saturday

I really like riffing on food -- taking disparate ideas and coming up with a unique recipe, dinner party idea, whatever. On thursday I was telling Keely that I was going to make some sorbets this weekend, and she commented that she wanted to make a weird one, maybe using thyme. At the time she was futzing in the kitchen in our office, and commented that we had a lot of packets of crushed red pepper from pizza deliveries in the drawers. About a week ago she had brought a chili/cherry chocolate bar to a dinner party. Within about 10 sec we riffed on that and she decided to make a chocolate sorbet with crushed red pepper, and do a sorbet party. Fun.

Made a blood orange sorbet, following David Lebowitz's recipe. His food blog is sweet, I'm going to have to add a link to the main page. Added a little vodka to his simple/elegant recipe. Wanted to add some stiffly beaten egg whites to bulk it up, but the color is just too pretty as is.Keely followed this recipe, which also happened to be from the David Lebowitz book the Perfect Scoop.... We modified it a bit, though, adding a little rum, egg whites, and 1T of crushed red pepper. Also used palm sugar instead of regular. Palm sugar is amazing stuff, it's buttery rich. Super tasty. This turned out really well, 1T was a good amount. Funny aside: she made it at my place, went to the co-op first for ingredients, and also got a kombucha; she took a miracle fruit tab so the kombucha tasted good.
The third entry was durian sorbet. Stefan had brought back some durian paste from his round-the-world trip. We tried some, as a gnarly food eating, lab bonding experience. It was a heck of a lot more enjoyable than the lutefisk experience. It helped that it was dried durian, though. Apparently the fresh stuff is putrid smelling -- it is banned from public transport in Singapore, for instance. Anyway, I've had the leftover paste in my fridge for forever, today was the day.

Durian Sorbet recipe:
2c palm sugar
1c water
1c fresh lime juice
lime zest
3.5 oz durian paste
3 bananas
1t rum
2 egg whites
Make a syrup with the first five ingredients. I used a stick blender to fully incorporate the durian.
Pour over frozen bananas. Again, I stick blendered it to smooth the bananas.
Add booze. Freezer.
The usual stir with a fork/stick blender cycle.
Fold in stiffly beaten egg whites towards the end.

Oh. That first image? French cookbooks tell you to beat egg whites in a copper bowl cause the copper reacts with them, and that helps them to retain their peaks. Here's proof -- the bottom of the bowl is shiny new and the sides are a little tarnished.