Eighth of an Acre Bounty

Forgive the dorky garnish, I get a bit carried away sometimes...

I broke down and bought an ice cream maker earlier this week. I’d been pondering it for quite a while, keeping an eye on CraigsList and finally just bought it.  As soon as I got it home I rushed the bowl into the freezer so it would be frozen and ready for some churning once I figured out what I was going to make. We have a good deal of lemon balm around this place that I am always trying to figure out a use for and earlier in the week I had set my mind to make a recipe I came across on The Accidental Hedonist.  But the sun decided to come out and play today after almost a week of cooler weather, and suddenly a super rich custard based ice cream didn’t seem so appealing. I am saving that recipe though and will most likely make it my next project.

Instead I fished around in the freezer, knowing that we still had some reserves of fruit frozen from last year. I took a gallon bag of blackberries we picked last September out and started doing research on basic proportions for a sorbet. I found this recipe from Cafe Lynnylu and got to cooking. Once I had boiled down the fruit in syrup I gave it a taste, waaaaay too sweet for my tastes. Then I remembered I had about a half quart of buttermilk languishing in the fridge. I added about two cups of buttermilk to the already prepared recipe and away we went.

Blackberry Buttermilk Sherbet

Adapted/Inspiration from Cafe Lynnylu

• 1lb fresh of frozen blackberries
• 1 1/4 cup sugar (I might even cut this down further next time)
• 1 cup water
• 2 cups buttermilk

Heat water and stir in sugar until fully dissolved. Add defrosted or fresh blackberries to the sugar mixture and bring to a boil, stirring until the fruit has softened sufficiently. Carefully pour berry-sugar mixture into a blender and puree. Pass through a sieve straining out all of the seeds. Add two cups (give or take) of buttermilk to the strained puree and cool for several hours before placing in ice cream maker.

The original recipe called for 10 lemon verbena leaves, which sounded great – and I actually threw in about 14 leaves to steep in the sugar syrup. But the resulting puree didn’t have even a hint of verbena in it. I suspect the blackberries are so richly berry-flavored already that the verbena leaves were no match for them. I would skip the verbena for this particular recipe and save em for something else where they will really shine through. The addition of the buttermilk gave it a slight tang and also added just a touch of creaminess to the hardcore blackberry flavor. Overall, not bad for a first tryst with a new toy.