Sunday, July 4, 2010

A Jungle of Mint

Summer is the time of year I love desserts the most. Well, that might only be partially true, as I love a dense, warm molten chocolate cake or gingerbread in the winter. But summer seems to bring endless flavor combinations with its ripe fruit.

Since getting an ice cream maker as a wedding present, I've been very busy whipping up various frozen desserts. I'd be hard-pressed to choose a favorite, so I'll just list what I've been making: fresh mint ice cream, watermelon sorbet, blackberry-strawberry sorbet, and blackberry-nectarine sorbet. Making this list, I've just realized that I've neglected to try a peach ice cream, so I'll need to remedy that soon.

My mint plant is out of control, as mint tends to get. Mint grows runner roots, which means the roots go out horizontally underground, sprouting up other shoots along the way. Another complication with mint is that once you cut it back, it grows several new shoots in the place you just cut. Our first solution to controlling it was having a mojito party, but alas, that just made it grow back twice as big. Luckily, I have it in a container, so it's not taking over the entire garden. But it produces far more mint than I can typically use.



Enter solution #2: fresh mint ice cream. All I can say about this is that it's a true revelation. I will admit that I love mint-chip ice cream, despite its disturbing artificial minty green color. For fresh mint ice cream, you steep mint in milk and cream, strain it, and make a custard. It does have a faint green color, but the taste is completely refreshing and lovely. I used this recipe.

But I can't eat mint all the time, so I've turned to sorbet for an easy, healthy dessert. Sorbet is ridiculously easy and basically has a formula: 2-6 cups of fruit, 1/4-1 cup of sugar, a tablespoon or two of lemon or lime juice, and sometimes water, depending on the fruit. For example, for watermelon sorbet, I mix 4 cups of watermelon, 1/4 cup sugar, and 2 tablespoons of lime juice. Watermelon doesn't need added water, and it's already pretty sweet, so not much sugar either. For blackberry-strawberry sorbet, I use 2 cups of strawberries, four cups of blackberries, a simple syrup of 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar, and one tablespoon of lime or lemon juice. Some of the combinations are a matter of experimentation; blend the fruit in a blender or food processor with some sugar (and water, if necessary) and keep tasting until you like the sweetness. I enjoy some tartness in sorbet. And if you don't have an ice cream maker, you can reduce the amount of water, pour the mixture (strain out seeds if there are berries) into a rectangular dish and freeze, scraping a fork across the mixture every 1-2 hours until it's frozen. Then you have granita, which is like a sno-cone, only without the nasty flavored syrup. Maybe you like the flavored syrup, but I prefer fresh watermelon flavor over, say, tiger's blood.

As for today, I think I'm going to put it all together and try a strawberry-mint ice cream.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

i love mint ice cream! yum!

Unknown said...

i love mint ice cream! yum!