The trick to making great sorbet

Sorbets are wonderful: they are simple to make, can meet almost everyone’s dietary requirements, and there are hundreds of flavor options available. They can be fickle, however: too much sugar and they become a soupy mess, too little sugar and they will turn out icy and hard.

So how can you tell if a recipe has the right amount of sugar to make a perfect, creamy sorbet? Professionals use an expensive device to test for sugar content, but Zoë François (via indexed magazine Fine Cooking) has a simpler solution, that uses an egg. Don’t worry, the egg isn’t added as an ingredient, it’s used to determine if the sugar content is right.

How can an egg help you determine sugar content? You float the egg, still in its shell, in your sorbet mixture prior to freezing. Says Zoë: “As the sorbet base becomes saturated (or dense) with sugar, the egg buoys to the surface. When you can see a quarter-size circle of eggshell, the sorbet has enough sugar to make it a soft, smooth success.”

Here are some highly-rated sorbet recipes from the EYB Library that you can use to test this technique. Let us know if you try it.

Coconut lime sorbet from Epicurious
Chocolate and raspberry sorbet from Tinned Tomatoes
Pink grapefruit-champagne sorbet by David Lebovitz
Strawberry and honey sorbet from The Kitchn
Mango sorbet from Chocolate and Zucchini

Photo of strawberrt and honey sorbet from The Kitchn