Spiced Orange & Honey Sorbet | Full Fork Ahead

By McCarleyRHLAC

Ingredients

• 3 cups water
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup clover honey
• 2 tablespoons finely grated orange peel
• 1 tablespoon chopped peeled fresh ginger
• 2 whole star anise or cardamom pods
• 2 whole cloves
• 1 small bay leaf, preferably fresh
• 2 cups chilled fresh orange juice
• 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Details

Servings 4
Preparation time 15mins
Cooking time 30mins
Adapted from fullforkahead.com

Preparation

Step 1

Combine first 8 ingredients in a large saucepan. Bring to boil over medium-high heat, stirring until sugar dissolves. Boil until syrup is thick and mixture is reduced to 2 cups, about 12 minutes. Discard bay leaf; cool syrup (speed this part up if desired by using an ice bath: place the syrup bowl in a larger one pre-filled with ice and water; stir syrup occasionally to help the cooling along).

Strain syrup into medium bowl. Add orange juice and lemon juice. Transfer to ice cream maker and process according to manufacturer’s instructions. Transfer sorbet to container, cover, and freeze until firm, at least 6 hours and up to 3 days.

If you don’t have an ice cream churner, place the mixture in your freezer-safe metal or glass dish and stir every hour or so, for about 6 hours or until firm.

Notes:

Can’t find star anise or cardamom pods? Take the seat next to ours, we couldn’t either. We substituted about 1/2 a teaspoon of ground cardamom, and we think this worked out fine.

Other possible good substitutes if you don’t want to use star anise or the cardamom: cinnamon sticks. Place one ot two in the simple syrup step and then discard it before processing in the churner or freezing.

A note on the texture: ginger, when grated, can still have a stringy-like texture, and since we used ground cardamom, I did wonder if the texture of this one would bother some. There’s also a little pulp from the freshly-squeezed orange juice. It seems to be a divided camp with some liking these kinds of textures in their sorbet, some not. We strained the pulp out of the juice before adding it, but not the rest of the syrup. If you’re the type that prefers to have little to no texture in their sorbet, I would definitely strain the entire mixture before churning/freezing.

Some reviews for this recipe over at Epicurious stated that the syrup should be well-chilled before churning to achieve a smoother sorbet. We didn’t chill ours for very long at all, so can’t comment for sure on this advice, but if anyone does chill their syrup for a while, please let us know how it turned out. Ours wasn’t terribly icy, but neither was it smooth or approaching creamy at all, not like sorbet I’ve bought in the store.