easy mango sorbet

I was one of the lucky people who won a copy of Lynne Rossetto Kasper's The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper over at Serious Eats. It's a great book -- tons of quality weekday recipes and great mini-anecdotes from lots of people in the food world; I couldn't stop flipping through it.

In it, she offers up a recipe for a pineapple sorbet that seemed quick and easy -- perfect for a summertime dessert. It calls for frozen pineapple to be quickly pureed in a food processor with lemon juice, sugar, and a bit of fresh ginger.

For some reason, though, my supermarket was out of frozen pineapple, so I decided to whip up a batch with frozen mango instead. I tweaked a bit further and came up with this -- a Mexican-inspired mango sorbet that you can make in a snap!

easy mango sorbet

21 oz. frozen mango
juice and zest of one lime
1/4 tsp almond extract
5 TB granulated sugar
pinch of salt
1 bottle of your favorite tequila

Get your food processor running and drop the mango through the feed chute a few chunks at a time until it's all in. Stop the processor. At this point, you'll wonder how this is going to become sorbet, as it looks like a bunch of finely chopped mangoes. Fear not.

Add the juice, zest, sugar, salt, extract, and 3 TB of tequila to the mangoes and puree until it is smooth and creamy. While this would make an excellent slushy, it's not yet a sorbet.

Pack this bright-orange slush into a tupperware-esque container, place plastic wrap directly onto the surface, and cap it with the appropriately sized tupperware-esque lid. Plunk that into your freezer and polish off the rest of the tequila with friends (lime and salt optional). By the time you're done getting hammered (4 hours?), the sorbet will have sufficiently solidified in the freezer. Alternatively, you can do this a day ahead and save yourself a hangover, but what fun is that?

Even after a day in the freezer, the sorbet is still scoopable -- the sugar and alcohol help ensure that. Serve it with grated lime and another shot. Cheers!

36 hours for cookies?

About two weeks ago, the New York Times Food Section published a story about one author's quest for chocolate chip cookie nirvana. In it, David Leite interviews several cookie pros in and around the Big Apple to identify some tips that could help home bakers find The Way with cookies:

1. Rest your dough. Leite recommends at least 24 hours but mentions that 36 are even better.
2. Under-bake your cookies. The key to a chewy cookie is to make sure it isn't cooked all the way through.
3. Don't be afraid of salt. Coarse salt in and on the cookies makes flavors "pop."
4. Make 'em big. Larger cookies can provide for cascading textures from crispy on the edge to chewy/gooey in the center, provided you pay attention to Tip #2.

Intrigued, I made a batch of these and waited. And waited. And waited. 36. Long. Hours.

Finally, I popped the dough balls into the oven, six at a time (they're big, don't forget). When they emerged from the oven, they were as advertised -- golden all over, rich, buttery, and with that variegated texture that Leite promised. My only substitution was for Ghirardelli semi-sweet (60% cacao) chocolate chips rather than Valrhona chocolate "feves" (which are flatter), mainly because that's what I had on hand. I don't think the cookies suffered, but I'm willing to give the feves a try one of these days.

Was the 36-hour wait worth it? Yes and no. The cookies were wonderful, but certainly not spontaneous. I think they were more uniformly golden than my usual batch of chocolate chip cookies, but the texture bit really stems from under-baking (I should really call this "properly baking" your cookies, as they aren't raw, just less done than the typical home baker makes them). The biggest selling point of this recipe, to me at least, is that you can make the dough and bake off a cookie or two at a whim, up to 3 days later according to the article (but probably as long as a week later if you wanted).

making pizza in naples, italy

My wife and I just got back from a 2-week vacation in Europe. We went to Messina, Venice, Dubrovnik, Florence, Pisa, Rome, Cannes, Nice, Barcelona, and Naples -- it was a whirlwind! Perhaps my favorite memory from the whole trip, though, is getting a pizza-making lesson in Naples. Here are some pics:

The Pizzaiolo at Les GaGá, GiGi.

He didn't speak a ton of English. Mostly GiGi's instruction was, "not-ta too much-a." He uses only San Marzano tomatoes in his sauce, plus buffalo mozzarella, extra virgin olive oil, and basil to top his pizza Margherita. This is good, since it is actually against the law to do otherwise.

He was very precise about the dough, too. "1 liter of water makes 15 pizza, each one weighing 250 grams. Only other ingredients are yeast, salt, and time, about 8 hours."

GiGi and I wave for the camera while the pizza cooks in the background. Seriously, this takes only about a minute. That oven is really, really hot!

The masterpiece! It tasted great. I should have taken pictures of the next three that GiGi made himself, but we were too invested in eating at that point. They were a little bigger (he was better at stretching the dough than I was) and soooo good. I know there is really no chance of reproducing this type of pizza at home without a wood-burning oven, but it was fun to get tips from a master!