On 6/20/2016 at 7:37 AM, paulraphael said:If you experiment with reducing some of the watermelon let us know how it goes. I'd like to know what that does to the flavor.
I made a watermelon sorbet and reduced some of the puree.
Since I wasn't sure how the reduction would alter the flavor, I reduced only half the puree, and I reduced that part 20% by weight. So the entire amount of puree was reduced by 10%. After reduction, the smell was a little odd and non-fruit like, though the taste was different than the smell and was OK. It's hard to say if reducing affected the flavor but it didn't ruin it either.
Overall, the finished product was quite good, taste-wise. The watermelon flavor came through pretty strong. It was a little on the too- sweet side, though. I felt that there were some defects too: it froze a little too cold and ended up too hard right out of the freezer, and the texture was a little crumbly. Once it warmed up, the texture was good and the crumbliness went away.
Anyone have any ideas what would cause a crumbly texture in a sorbet? Since the sugar level was comparable to other sorbets I've had success with (particularly strawberry), my guess is the watermelon sorbet was lacking solids. I also used corn syrup as the invert.
I opted not to strain it, hoping to retain some extra solids but maybe that is not enough. I am definitely thinking about trying either some nonfat milk solids, or get some stabilizers to try. I wanted to try it with as few extra ingredients as possible but I think a thin juice like watermelon might need a little help. I might get some dextrose as well, to add some FP suppression without adding sweetness.
Here was the formulation I tried:
(start) 30 oz fresh watermelon puree, unstrained
(final) 27 oz watermelon, after reducing half of it by 20%
8.25 ounces sugar
4.70 ounces of corn syrup
1 tsp lemon juice
1/16 tsp pinch of salt
Edit: I checked and my strawberry sorbet actually has more sugar in it (37% of total weight vs 30% of total weight). That could partly explain the difference in hardness.
