Pineapple Jasmine Sherbet

Before I returned it to the library, the last recipe I made out of Hello, My Name is Ice Cream, was a sherbet. It required a lot of patience and effort, but this floral, tropical frozen dessert was worth.

The recipe calls for concentrating the juice of two fresh pineapples. I wasn’t sure what the best way of doing that was, but I blitzed the peeled, cored fruit in a blender, then pushed it through a sieve by hand. This took a long time, and the resulting juice was quite foamy.

One learning I had from this experience was infusing the tea in the milk mixture. I went to a specialty store, Ten Ren, to get a small tin of jasmine pearls. This pricey ingredient promised an intense fragrance, but the recipe also cautioned not to infuse for too long. Unfortunately, with around 5 minutes of steeping, the pearls had not fully unfurled, and did not impart much flavour to the ice cream base.

Still, this sherbet was fantastic. The intensity of the pineapple flavour is what you notice right away. And if I can coax more jasmine flavour out of the tea next time, that would elevate this to perfection. One slight distraction is the detectable taste of the milk powder I used. All of the recipes in the book use it to improve texture, and it seems to work, as the sherbet was still fairly easy to scoop even after a few weeks in the freezer.