Chocolate-Blackberry Sorbet and Beet-Nutmeg Ice Cream

On Wednesday, I picked a little over a gallon of blackberries at Phillips Farms to use in my first Huge Hound sorbet: Chocolate-Blackberry (which is on the right in the photo). I wish I'd picked twice that amount and made twice as much of this sorbet, because 1) it's amazing and 2) I produced only 10 pints of it, and Kurt, my chaperone at the club, bought one of them, so I've got only nine to take to the market. And I may set one aside for Tony, so that would make only eight to take to the market.

The blackberry picking was easy; it took only a little over a half hour to almost fill my bucket.

As I noted in my previous post, CB is my favorite sorbet among all those I've made over the years. This flavor resulted from the combination of two separate, slightly tweaked sorbet recipes from the first frozen dessert book I ever bought: Williams-Sonoma Kitchen Library: Ice Creams & Sorbets; I literally make a dark chocolate sorbet base and a blackberry sorbet base and combine the two before processing the mixture in my home ice cream maker or batch freezer. That book started me off on my frozen dessert adventures, and I continue to use it as a guide for proportions of ingredients when I'm experimenting with new flavors.

After Kurt tried my sorbet, he declared it to be his new favorite Huge Hound product, replacing the Lemon Verbena Ice Cream. I think my regular customers will go wild for it, too, and I'm eager to get their reactions. Ditto for my new ice cream.

I roasted about 3 pounds of peeled and chopped, dark-red and candy-striped beets from Sandbrook Meadow Farm in a foil-tented pan with salted water. I then pureed the beets and their juices in a blender with (about two-thirds of a seed of) freshly grated nutmeg. Then I stirred the puree into my ice cream base.

I enjoyed the final product. (Kurt doesn't like beets, so he wasn't a helpful taste taster for this ice cream.) I expected the flavor to be more beet-forward with a back note of nutmeg, but my palate detects the beet and nutmeg flavors almost equally.

Come to the market on Sunday and enjoy samples of both of my new flavors. (And then buy some, of course.)