Sorbets

Appears in

By Bo Friberg

Published 1989

  • About
Sorbets are made from a wide variety of fruit juices or purees. Recently, the addition of spices and herbs such as thyme, rosemary, and basil have been popularized by some adventurous chefs, along with savory sorbet variations made from tomato or cucumber for example. These are served as refreshing first courses or as intermezzos (between courses) to cleanse the palate.

The flavor of the sorbet base is adjusted to the proper level of sweetness by the addition of water or sugar syrup. This is most easily done using a saccharometer, also known as a syrup density meter, hydrometer, or Baumé hydrometer, which measures the sugar content in a liquid. A saccharometer is a hollow glass tube weighted at the bottom, which will read 0° in tepid water. The mixture, therefore, must be at room temperature for the reading to be accurate. The calibration on the scale, usually from 0° to 50°, refers to degrees of Baumé, named for the Frenchman Antoine Baumé, who invented both the Baumé scale and the Baumé hydrometer. The reading for sorbet and ices is generally between 12° and 20°, depending on their use (by comparison, icy granitàs typically have a Baumé reading around 8° to 12°). In some instances, the mixture may be too thick for the saccharometer to float freely, which is also necessary in order to give an accurate reading. In such cases, a small amount of the mixture can be diluted with an equal amount of measured water, and the “diluted” reading on the saccharometer is then doubled to determine the Baumé level for the remaining mixture.