It's Hot To Be Iced -- Sorbets Cool Down A Summer Evening

SORBET - NOTHING IS MORE cool or, at this time of the year, more welcome.

Lately, there are few dinner items more fashionable. Sherbets or sorbets, which are simpler concoctions, usually devoid of cream or eggs, are gastronomically, so to speak, hot.

Hot again, that is.

A dozen years ago, it was mostly French restaurants that served them as entre-actes, refreshing pauses between the main players in multi-course dinners. Americans ate sherbets either alone or as desserts.

Sherbets are still bought and sold (or made at home) as desserts. But made with all manner of fanciful flavors and herbs, they are now found included in a wide variety of restaurant presentations - and usually as sorbets.

A couple of months ago, for example, at the new Pompeii restaurant in Bellevue's Koll Center, I was served a dessert-course portion of raspberry-basil sorbet. The combination seemed capricious at first (I usually prefer basil in a tomato sauce over pasta, or shredded into a Thai shrimp soup), but the two worked together beautifully and, with a little less sugar and perhaps a bit of frozen wine churned in, could have been served before the main course.

Speaking of capricious, the most remarkable sorbet I encountered in recent years was at an alumni-chefs gathering at Seattle Central Community College, where noted local consultant chef Kathy Casey and chef Charmaine Eads of the Manor Farm Inn, Poulsbo, in diligent pursuit of a truly "Northwest" dinner, included a Douglas Fir Sorbet.

The palate freshener's mention (first printed in this newspaper) was picked up around the country, mentioned again in the New York Times and led to a siege of questions as to how one incorporated an evergreen tree (or a piece of close-grained lumber) into a glace. I thought the dish was surprisingly good (and without question novel), although some marveled that it was a little like kissing a chilly hemlock.

The most appealing aspect of sherbets and sorbets is that they are grand in hot weather and can be either bought or made entirely fat free. And if you choose to make them yourself, you can keep the sugar calories to a minimum as well.

In fact, the less sugar they contain, the easier sherbets/sorbets are to make. Sugar inhibits freezing.

My old edition of the "Larousse Gastronomique" contains a venerable recipe for a wine-based sorbet that is simple and good: For a quart of sorbet, you mix a half liter of "any sweet wine" with the juice of two lemons and of one orange with a strained, cooled syrup made from two cups of water and one cup of sugar boiled for five minutes.

You chill it all, run it in any ice-cream maker (I use a very ordinary Donvier) and add to it, if you choose, either a light meringue of egg white (about one cup) or of whipped cream.

For a less sweet sorbet, substitute a young, fruity red or white wine and lower the sugar content of the syrup to your tastes. It's an easy dish to play around with - the mistakes are almost always edible (or drinkable) in some form.

What's the difference between a sherbet, a sorbet, a granita?

Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins in "The New Basics Cookbook" define sherbet as having "a little milk or egg white added to the fruit purees to smooth them out" and sorbets usually being made without either. Granitas are not swirled or churned, but frozen still, and as a result have larger ice crystals. They are coarser and more granular.

Although all are easily made, they are undoubtedly more easily purchased.

Some of the commercial products available in supermarkets are quite good. Some less so. I foraged through a nearby Larry's Market a few days ago and came up with several candidates for a summer dinner table:

One was the nationally available Dole Sorbet line (I tried the peach), two were local or close to it: Cascade Springs of Seattle, and Cascadian Farm of Rockport (certified by the State of Washington as an organic food), and another was a Novato, Calif., product, completely sugar-free, called Nouvelle Sorbet.

I also picked up a pint each of Vitarich's Pineapple Sherbet and Yami's Marionberry sorbet. Vitarich is a Seattle ice creamery, Yami a regional yogurt maker.

They were all surprisingly different.

The smoothest sorbet was Dole's, probably because of its additives ("locust bean gum, pectin and sugar gum"). It's primarily made from a puree of peaches, water, sugar, corn syrup and the always intriguing "natural flavors." Tumeric and annatto extracts are added for color.

For all of that, it's a pleasant tasting, if not very distinctive "sorbet," with a texture much more like that of an ice cream.

Also quite smooth, although not very intensely flavored, was Vitarich's sherbet, which lists milk, water, sugar, corn sweetener and cream as primary ingredients before we arrive at crushed pineapples, citric acid, stabilizers and artificial flavors and colorings.

I thought Vitarich's "sherbet" would be identified by most tasters as an ice cream if they came across it unlabeled.

Nouvelle Sorbet's "No sugar added" Apricot is actually made from a mixture of fruits other than the namesake apricot: apple, peach and pear juices are added, along with fruit pectins to help thicken.

It didn't have much flavor, however, other than of a generalized, nonspecific fruitiness. I think most tasters would have had trouble identifying the sorbet as primarily apricot.

Cascade Springs' "Sunrise Grapefruit" was noticeably icy - its first-listed ingredient was water - but the rest of the recipe was either fruit (pink grapefruit) or grape and pear concentrates and pectins. The flavor was rather thin, three of us thought as we passed pensive spoons around.

The Yami Marionberry, too, listed water (along with a berry concentrate) as the dominant ingredient. But it was pleasant and reassuringly fruity.

The winner of the sorbet sweeps was Cascadian Farm's Blackberry All Fruit Sorbet, where "water" was the third-listed component, after blackberries and grape-juice concentrate.

The organically certified sorbet had a robust, natural flavor that lingered after the chill had left the tongue.

It wasn't the best sorbet we tasted during the two days that we ran our sampling, however.

On a whim, we drove to Northgate and bought a Donvier ice-cream maker ($39.99 plus tax) at Kitchen & Company, and a sack of Texas pink grapefruit from a nearby market. The idea was to compare a homemade sorbet with a commercial product. There was not a real comparison.

The Donvier is a simple, hand-cranked ice-cream maker with a coolant-filled metal inner cylinder. You freeze the cylinder overnight, assemble and chill the ingredients and then begin a sporadic turning of the dasher handle to convert the cooled liquids into ice.

The directions that come with the unit are bare bones minimal. Fortunately, you don't need much. We adapted a recipe from Jim Dodge's "The American Baker," combined grapefruit juice (about two and a half cups) with one and a quarter cups of sugar dissolved in one and a half cups of water, boiled five minutes into a simple syrup and chilled.

Because it tasted a bit too sweet to us, we added the juice of two small lemons, the zest from one grapefruit and a half-dozen coarsely chopped leaves of fresh mint from the back yard garden patch.

We churned, following direction, a few turns every minute for about a half-hour, then poured the slurry into a pan in the freezer to set.

It was spectacular - far better than any of the products we had purchased. With a touch less sugar it would have been perfect for a mid-meal palate cleanser; as it was, it was a fine dessert on a hot night.

A postscript: never one to leave well enough alone, I spooned a hefty scoop into a glass of chilled, inexpensive Champagne. Ha!

Science never rests.

(Copyright 1993, John Hinterberger. All rights reserved.)

John Hinterberger's food columns and restaurant reviews appear Sundays in Pacific and Fridays in Tempo. Benjamin Benschneider is a Seattle Times photographer.