Friendly KiwiVegan FriendlyDessert PostedKiwi SorbetVegan SorbetSorbet RecipesRecipes With KiwiVegan Recipes SmoothiesIcecream RecipesForwardWho wants a bite of our cooling kiwi sorbet? Serve this delicious recipe with coconut yogurt and fresh kiwi slices for a fun dessert.I can hardly say anything beyond that. My back is dripping sweat, my brain is fried, and my garden is crying out for relief. When it’s this hot outside, granita is the perfect treat. And you know what? The name “granita” is unnecessarily sophisticated; it’s basically a glorified slushie. To make granita, you do nothing more than pour a fruity liquid into a pan, then place it in the freezer and use a spoon or fork to scrape the icy mixture as it freezes. It couldn’t be simpler, and there are so many different varieties: just make a liquid out of any fruit, pour it in a pan, and freeze it. You’ve just made granita. Here’s a watermelon version. The color is gorgeous, the melon version shines through, and it just sings summer.

You need a watermelon. Try to get your hands on a seedless one; makes things much easier. Don’t mess with me. Not pretty, but it doesn’t really matter. Next time I’ll brandish my machete. Cut up the watermelon however you like to do things. I’m only using 1/3 to 1/2 of this one, so I’m cutting it into nice pieces so the rest can be slurped down by the kids. Watermelon is so pretty. By the way, you might notice that I’ve been cooking/photographing grub up at the Lodge more and more lately. I’ve been doing big cooking days, doing new recipes for both PW Cooks and my next cookbook, and I’ve fallen in love with the light up there. I have some funny tricks I’ll show you on PW Photography later this week. Next up, violently slice two limes in half… And squeeze the juice. Get about eight cups of large chunks. You can see that this “seedless” watermelon actually has a few piddly seeds. But they’re light and soft–much more palatable than the big black suckers in standard watermelons.

Add the lime juice to the blender (or food processor).A little, not a lot, because you want the watermelon flavor to really shine through. Pack the blender as full as it’ll go… Then blend it up, piddly seed remnants and all.blendtec ez blender ebay Pour out about half the mixture into a bowl, then add the rest of the watermelon and blend it up.kitchenaid artisan 9 speed hand mixer khm926 About the seeds: I didn’t mind just pulverizing the soft little seeds in the mixture. blendtec blender costco roadshowThey absolutely disappeared, and there wasn’t a speck of one in the finished granita. waring xtreme mx1050 blender

If you like, though, you can strain the liquid through a mesh strainer before freezing it. And of course, if you wind up using a regular watermelon with big black seeds, you’ll definitely want to strain it first.black and decker cyclone blender target This all sounds complicated, but I promise it took all of fifteen minutes.blendtec designer series vs hp3a Maybe thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds.ninja master prep professional blender qb1000 Once all the watermelon, lime juice, and sugar are blended together, just pour it into a 9 x 13 baking dish. Cover it with plastic wrap (I didn’t, actually, because I’m lazy) and freeze it for a good two or three hours for the first step.

Gently scrape the top layer with a spoon or fork. It’ll be more frozen around the sides. After that–and once you start to get close to the less-frozen middle, cover the pan and return it to the freezer for another couple of hours. Repeat this process–freeze for a couple of hours, scrape, return to the freezer, freeze for a couple of hours, scrape, etc. Continue until it’s all scraped! Note that you can just skip all the in-between steps and freeze the whole thing before you start scraping, but I find that it’s easier–and less muscle-intensive–to do it in stages. For the final stage, I used a fork. There is no rhyme or reason to whether I use a fork or spoon. It just depends on whether the moon is in the seventh house that day.The great thing about granita is that the light, scraped ice on top stays perfectly frozen in the freezer. It never clumps up or crystallizes or wigs out or messes up or has an existential crisis. It’s always light, cold, and perfect.

The mercury’s rising outside. Confession: I was going to save this for my cookbook. But I have a really difficult time having new recipes in the hopper and not sharing them with you here. It’s a problem I have. Make granita this week! Serve it in a pretty glass, serve it in a bowl…or just snarf it down right out of the pan as you stand outside the freezer and try to cool down. Not that I would ever do that. Watermelon GranitaJuly 18, 2011 Prep Time:15 MinutesDifficulty:EasyServings:8 ServingsThe Best Electric Ranges for Your KitchenOne of the reasons I went to culinary school, after working in professional kitchens for a few years, was to have an understanding of why my recipes didn’t always work. Things would succeed if I followed the recipe to the letter, but if I played or strayed at all they would have as much chance of being a disaster as they did a winner. In culinary school I learned enough about food science to be able to play with recipes or create my own from scratch.

I learned why eggs should be warm when you whip them and why you should use low protein flours for cakes and higher ones for breads. They taught me about Brix, Baume and other technical ways to measure sugar in sorbet solutions so they will freeze, but not become a solid brick of ice. After school, once I could afford it, I bought a Refractometer, which shows you the sugar content in a solution. This way I can mix up a batch of any kind of fruit sorbet, add some simple syrup and the sorbet will be a success. But, what if you are just making sorbet a couple times a year, do you really need such a geeky, expensive gadget? Not unless you are a kitchen equipment hoarder, like me.There is another way to have a greater chance at success than just praying for the best. You can use a method that involves floating an egg in your sorbet. Yep, I said FLOATING AN EGG, the whole thing, in the shell. It is also a very cool experiment to do with your kids. As the solution gets more saturated with sugar, the egg is buoyed to the surface.

Once the egg is actually floating partially above the surface, the solution has enough sugar to prevent the sorbet from being too icy. Perhaps not as impressive as whipping out your refractometer, but pretty amazing in a Beakman’s World kind of way and it allows you to make sorbet from just about any juice. Obviously, this will not work with all fruits, banana puree tends to be too thick and the egg, no matter how sweet the solution, will float on the surface. But, for citrus and other thin juices, it is wonderful. I recently candied a bunch of citrus for an Easter cake I have been working on (more to come). After removing all the peels, I was left with a bunch of tasty fruit, which I certainly didn’t want to waste. I put the grapefruits and blood oranges in a food processor and pureed them together and put them thorough a Chinois Strainer. The result was a gorgeous, red, tangy juice. It was a bit too tangy to drink on its own, but I knew it would make a dynamite sorbet. 3 cups juice (your choice, just make it a thin one), chilled (if you are using lemon or lime juice, it is too intense all on its own and you should start by diluting it with some water.

I usually go with 2 parts juice, 1 part water). 2 cups simple syrup (you won’t use it all, but it is better to have too much, it lasts almost forever), chilled 1 to 2 tablespoons liqueur (this is for flavor, but it also prevents the sorbet from freezing solid. Alcohol won’t freeze, so it is great insurance that you will have a soft sorbet. BUT, if you add too much sorbet won’t freeze at all and you will basically have a margarita or daiquiri!) 1 very clean egg (I wash it with dish soap and rinse several times) Put your juice in a container that has room to add more liquid and is deep enough that you can submerge an egg. Gently place the egg in the container. At this point it will probably sink straight to the bottom, so don’t just drop it in. If it heads to the bottom, remove it and add about 1/2 cup of the simple syrup. Stir and try the egg again. This time when you put the egg in it should be suspended in the liquid, maybe not to the surface yet, but hovering just below.

Can you see the egg in mine, I am pointing at the faint white spot under the surface. Add another 1/2 cup of the simple syrup and stir. Place the egg in the sorbet, now you can see it starting to emerge. It needs to be about the size of a quarter above the surface to indicate that there is enough sugar in your solution. Add it a couple of  tablespoons at a time until you have the right level. Once it is floating high enough, add the liquor or liqueur of your choosing. Freeze the sorbet according to the manufacturer’s instructions. I freeze a bowl to the put the sorbet in so it won’t melt when you take it out of the machine. If the sorbet hardens a bit after being frozen for a couple of days, you can temper it by letting it “warm up” in the refrigerator for 20 minutes before serving. HINT: the greatest thing about sorbet is it can be frozen, thawed and refrozen over and over. If your sorbet has been in the freezer for a while and is losing its nice texture, just thaw it and return it to the ice cream maker to freeze it again.