  |
|
|
|
Cooking with PomegranatesUse Pomegranates to Make a Refreshing Sorbet for a Holiday Dessert
Pomegranates are one of the crown jewel fruits of winter. Good for juicing, they also serve as the base for a tasty pomegranate sorbet.
Every year, from October to January, pomegranates begin to appear in many grocery markets. These beautiful hard, red, thick-skinned fruits can be eaten in several different ways. For instance, you can make the juice of the pomegranate into sorbet. When you look for pomegranates in the store, you can’t really tell what the inside’s going to look like from looking at the outside. Sometimes, the darker red the pomegranate, the paler the seeds will be. What you really are looking for are dark-red seeds and a pomegranate that’s heavy for its size. The heavier it is, the juicer (and probably the sweeter) it will be. To juice a pomegranate, first roll it like you would a lemon to get the juices running inside. This will transform a very hard and firm pomegranate into a little bit of a soft and bruised pomegranate. It’s then time to squeeze it. Cut it through crosswise as you would a grapefruit. Be extremely careful of the juice, because this juice stains very badly. Always work on a covered surface, lined with parchment paper. Put the pomegranate on a juice squeezer and squeeze as you would a grapefruit or an orange. A Hamilton Beech juice squeezer is good for this kind of fruit. Extract as much juice as you can. Another way to extract the juice from the seeds is with a juicer. Score the skin into eighths or tenths, and then poke a knife in the center of the fruit and break it open into sections. Pull the seeds from the sections. Just fill the funnel of the juicer with seeds. Collect the juice in a container through a sieve just to make sure that there are no fibers coming out of the juice extractor. If you want to serve pomegranate sorbet in the pomegranate shell, you have to take all the seeds out of the shell by cutting off about a quarter of the top. Then, with a spoon, you dig out all the seeds. These seeds are what go into the juice extractor. Then, you’re left with a shell for your pomegranate sorbet. To get 3 cups of pomegranate juice, you’ll need anywhere from four giant pomegranates to eight or nine medium pomegranates. To make the sorbet, you need 1 cup of water that’s been mixed with ¾ cup of granulated sugar. Heat the water and sugar until the sugar has been dissolved. Add the sugar syrup to the pomegranate juice. Chill the mixture really well, and then put the chilled mixture into a sorbet maker or an ice cream-maker and follow manufacturer’s instructions. Once the sorbet has frozen, you then can fill the pomegranate shells. If you’re going to serve a large crowd and you want to serve the sorbet in the shells, keep the shells in acidulated water so that they don’t darken. Then, dry them really well. Let them even rest upside down until you’re ready to fill them. It’s advantageous to fill these shells three to four hours before the dessert is going to be served. Keep them on a tray in your freezer until you’re ready to serve. Uncover the shells, and fill them with two large scoops of the pomegranate sorbet. Sprinkle with a few seeds of the pomegranate. Put the top on the shell a little askew, and you have a very spectacular, holiday-like dessert. Related LinksLearn more about cooking with pomegranates from Devorah Stone in Seasonal Cooking.
The copyright of the article Cooking with Pomegranates in Dessert Recipes is owned by Michael Vyskocil. Permission to republish Cooking with Pomegranates in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
|
|
|
|
