Fragrant Recipe: Violet Lavender Sorbet
As a follow-up to yesterday's post, I'm proposing the recipe of a Violet Lavender Sorbet made with real flowers. The source is Edible Flowers -- Desserts and Drinks by Cathy Wilkinson Barash. Book is available here from Amazon.com.
The recipe was tried at least by one person on recipezaar.com and she thinks highly of it; she also simplifies it.
Here it is:
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups water
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup lavender flowers (use 2 tablespoons dried lavender if you can't find these)
1/2 cup violets (if unavailable, use purple pansies or purple petunias)
2 tablespoons lime juice (this is what will make your preparation turn from grey into a pretty violet color)
Use of a Vita-Mix type of appliance is recommended
Directions:
- Pour one cup of water into a saucepan.
- Add 1/2 cup sugar.
- Bring to a boil, let simmer for 4 minutes, swirling pan occasionally.
- Remove from heat.
- Put the chopping blade in your food processer.
- Add lavender and 1/4 cup sugar and process for 3 minutes, or until flowers and sugar are blended and in tiny pieces.
- Add lavender mixture to mixture in saucepan and combine well.
- Let mixture stand for at least one hour at room temperature.
- Strain mixture and set aside.
- In a nonmetatlic saucepan, bring 1/2 cup water to a boil.
- Remove from heat.
- Add violets.
- Steep violets in water for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
- Strain mixture through cheesecloth and then squeeze cheesecloth to release blue color.
- Blend lavender syrup with the violet water.
- Add lime juice to mixture.
- Freeze in an ice-cream maker.
Simplified version not using an ice-cream maker:
Put all ingredients all at once in your mixer on high for 1 mn
Add lime juice
Let it cool off to room temperature, then add two trays of ice-cubes
1 mn later you have sorbet without having to go through the simmering and straining processes
I don't know if I'll ever actually succeed at this recipe but it sounds scrumptious! I like to cook with lavender in an Herbes de Provence mix which I buy ready-mixed. That's when I cook which isn't often. ;-) I also like to add lavender to white wine on occasion. Also, being Japanese, I grew up eating many different edible flowers and leaves.
How interesting you mention this Japanese tradition of making use of edible flowers in their cuisine! I know some friends who were organizing an exchange between French and Japanese chefs specializing in edible flowers so that they could learn from each other's tradition.
The French and the Japanese--they take their culinary arts pretty seriously, down to all those ways you have to splicy dicey--too much for me. But I remember my mother, who is an excellent cook, once making a tasty dish with tsukushi (field horsetail) back in Japan. These are like weeds you pick out of the grass and take home and cook! I was told it was some tradition but I don't recall the story behind it.
This is a tangent but Japanese foods have many folklores behind why we eat what we eat when we eat them, similar to Jewish culture, I believe (eating bitter herbs during Passover, etc). It's just another aspect of why we might continue to eat edible flowers and plants when we don't really have to. Some of those things taste great, though: I love eating the salty cherry leaf on sakuramochi.
Monin makes incredible rose, jasmine, violet and lavender syrups. I am addicted to them...they all make wondrous sorbets and granitas as well as being marvelous in plain black or green tea, or champagne, or in a martini as well....
Valentina,
It's good to know that they are, indeed, delicious. I hesitate to order them for fear of becoming addicted to them:)
i can imagine how toothsome it is. but would you tell me if any kind of lavender we could eat?
I'll look into it. Mounier perhaps?