Recreation: Green Apple Rosemary Sorbet

As promised, I attempted to reverse engineer the Green Apple Rosemary Sorbet we had at Niche in St. Louis last month. My friend A at LickityList originally experienced this delightful treat with me, and we both formulated a plan to try to recreate it ourselves.

Here's how I attacked it: boiled rosemary in simple syrup until my entire house smelled like a Christmas tree. Grated 6 granny smiths (unpeeled) and the juice of one lemon in my food processor (because I broke our blender making bisque on Thanksgiving, boo), then pulsed until I had juicy puree. Strained the juice in my chinois, then added just a hint of the pulp back into the mix for texture and color. Then I added the juice mixture to the rosemary simple syrup and threw all of that into my ice cream maker. Unfortunately, my impatience got the best of me (as usual) and I made two critical errors: 1) I didn't freeze my ice cream maker bowl long enough to bring it down to freezing temperature, and to make matters worse, 2) I didn't chill my simple syrup enough before pouring it into the ice cream maker. You can guess that freezing the solution into a lovely sorbet consistency was pretty much a lost cause. Also, waiting around for the mixture to freeze caused me to lose some of my lovely green color, making my sorbet look more like pea soup, a problem also experienced by A at Lickity List (because as we all know, apples brown: polyphenols + oxygen = rust colorations).

Determined not to forfeit, into the freezer my concoction went. It froze as expected, I scraped and scraped the rock hard green mass with a spoon, and voila: Green Apple Rosemary Snow Cone...minus the cone.

The verdict: the texture was all wrong (because it wasn't, afterall, a sorbet), but according to Big N, the taste was actually better than Niche's. Mine had more rosemary flavor, which gave it a refreshing minty quality, but it wasn't too sweet. I may try this one again, sans Ice Cream maker mishaps. It'd make a lovely intermezzo for the wine pairing tasting menu I'm planning for late-January. More on that later.