Homemade Watermelon Sorbet

This post was written in late June, and somehow never was published. It would still be a fun treat for Labor Day picnics!!

Now that my new ice cream churn has been initiated by vanilla ice cream, it's time to make some frosty sorbets for these hot summer days!

My last attempt at a sorbet was many years ago, when my mother and I tried to make a grapefruit sorbet from canned grapefruit juice. Several months earlier, I had taken her out to a fancy dinner for her birthday and they served a grapefruit sorbet frozen in grapefruit shells and sliced like cantaloupe as a palate cleanser before the main course. It was wonderful!

So, Mother and I got ice and rock salt, set up the churn and brought out her canned grapefruit juice. Within about 15-20 cranks of the churn handle, the dang thing stopped cold and I thought I had broken it. Not so... the sorbet was already frozen solid! But as it turned out, it was so salty we couldn't eat it... who knew they added so much salt to canned grapefruit juice? So my mother and step-father had frozen Salty Dogs for their evening cocktails all summer long!

I'm ready to try again, this time with fresh watermelon. (In the interim years I have made granitas in trays, but they are a different texture than a real churned sorbet.)

I bought 2 watermelons... and threw one away as it was totally tasteless. The one I cubed and seeded was fairly sweet, so I only added sugar to taste as I made the mixture, using this recipe below only as a guideline. I also added lime juice to taste since I had much more purée than the recipe called for.

Watermelon Sorbet Recipe
* ½ cup plus 4 cups seeded and pureed watermelon
* ½ cup sugar
* 2 tablespoons lime juice
* 1 teaspoon lime zest

In a small saucepan, bring ½ cup watermelon puree and the sugar to a simmer and remove it from the heat. Add the lime juice and zest and allow the mixture to cool for 20 minutes. Add the 4 cups fresh watermelon puree to the melon-lime mixture, and then freeze in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

Makes 8 servings. 

A big bowl of hand-churned sorbet... (it only looks orange because of the room lighting).

Made several small containers for the freezer. YUM!!