Creamy Dark Chocolate Sorbet

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was selected by Steph of A Whisk and A Spoon. She chose Creamy Dark Chocolate Sorbet. Now, I’m not that big of fan of making ice cream, mainly because I don’t have an ice cream maker. Plus, I knew I was going to be out of town for the weekend and I wasn’t sure that I’d really have the time to make this. But I looked at the recipe and it looked so simple and I did have the ingredients on hand, so I decided to give it a shot. You can get the complete recipe for this sorbet on Steph’s blog.

The dictionary defines sorbet as a “usually a fruit-flavored ice.” This isn’t fruit-flavor, but flavored instead with bittersweet chocolate. Instead of making an egg custard, you just combine water, sugar, milk and chocolate. I wanted to spice it up a bit so I also added hazelnut extract to the mixture. Other flavors would be good, too, but I am partial to the chocolate hazelnut combination (so much so that it has its own tag in my blog!)

This was super simple to make, but as I have to use David Lebovitz’s freeze and stir method, this takes hours to get to ice cream-like consistency. After 4 hours of freezing and stirring, I decided to call it “good enough” and let it freeze before serving it the next day. It still was somewhat soft and very scoop-able after freezing overnight. The flavor of this is unexpectedly good. My husband said “fudgesicle” which is fairly close. The texture is really nice and the chocolate shines through. You can just pick up the faintest hint of hazelnut. For something that I wasn’t going to make, this recipe turned out to be a delightful surprise.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, page 431