Minneola (naartjie) sorbet with splash of vodka

This recipe started out as a naartjie sorbet because I had been promising my friend John (who loves naartjie) that I would make it for him for about 2 years. I knew naartijes were going out of season, so grabbed a whole lot and sent them through my juice machine.  I then proceeded to make the syrup with the juice and decided to do a bit of writing.

Two things were very wrong with the situation so far.

1. I discovered that if you juice naartjies through the juice extractor the pips also get juiced and impart a very bitter tannin taste to the juice.  This doesn’t seem to be so much of a problem for oranges which I frequently juice through the extractor.  But I overlooked this and thought things would balance out when the sugar was added.
2. Never let a pot boil on the stove whilst engaging in other activities like writing, blogging or surfing the internet without putting a timer on.  I have made this basic error a few times before and have: burnt a boiled egg and nearly destroyed a beloved Le Crueset pot by allowing a caramel to blacken so badly.

So the naartjie syrup overboiled and was destroyed.

By the time I got around to buying more naartjies, they were looking quite tired, late in the season and lacking adequate juice. I decided to opt for the more juicy minneolas, which after all are pretty similar and in my opinion even better. In case you didn’t know for sure, a minneola is a cross between a tangerine and a grapefruit and is an easy peeler.

I asked John if he minded and he assured me that he too liked minneolas even more.

I used my orange juice attachment on my food processor, sliced the minneolas in half and juiced them sans the pips. They yielded so much more juice than the naartjies, so I landed up with 1.5 litres of juice to make my sorbet. I later discovered this was a little too much capacity for my ice cream machine to handle and in future, I would stick to a litre.

Here is my recipe for 1.5 litres of minneola sorbet: (you could use any other citrus fruit juice of your choice)

• 1.5 liters of minneola juice (or any citrus juice)
• 1.5 cups of sugar (1/2 cup of sugar per 2 cups of juice)
• 1 added 1/2 cup of wine to the syrup, which largely got cooked off
• so I added 60 ml (4 Tbs) vodka just before I added it to the machine, you want about 2Tbs of alcohol per 2 cups of juice

Add the juice and the sugar to a pot, and heat until the sugar has dissolved (it is not necessary to boil).  Add the wine (some of this alcohol cooks off).  Remove from the heat and add the vodka and then cool in the fridge.  When cool, churn through your ice cream machine until sorbet consistency.

It will be lovely to have the winter citrus flavours carry over into the early part of summer as things start warming up.

If you want to learn how to make ice cream or sorbet without a machine check out these articles here:

David Lebovitz

Not Without Salt