Blackcurrant purée for sorbet base - advice wanted!

Rickard_Modig_19323

I want to make some blackcurrant sorbet but I can't find a recipe for how to make the purée.

My plan is to buy frozen berries, cook sous vide, blitz in a blender then pass through a sieve.

I'm looking for advice on time and temperature. Modernist Cuisine had a lot of suggestions for other fruit and berries, but none for blackcurrant. Going to the library tomorrow to look in The Fat Duck cookbook but I doubt I'll find it there either.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

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Brandon_34695

I would recommend adding a fair amount of lemon juice for seasoning. I follow proportions in the back of Eleven Madison Park as a guide, but with so few ingredients you could really do it by taste.

Rickard_Modig_19323

Thanks for the suggestion. I certainly appreciate recipe suggestions as well but I didn't want to make my post too long.

I was planning to follow the recipe in Heston Blumenthal at Home which includes lemon juice, as you suggest. I'm also waiting for malic acid in the mail which may or may not be better than lemon, I don't know.

As for the complete recipe, I will be using fructose, a bit of vodka and a refractometer to fine tune the solids content. Churning with dry ice in a kitchen aid. Serving with a basic MC At Home pie with vanilla/cinnamon pastry cream topped with caramelized almonds.

Something that confuses me a bit about Blumenthal's recipe is that he adds a fair ammount of tapwater, about 1/3 of the total mass of the recipe. Maybe it will be too thick otherwise but it seems to me like it would dilute the flavors.

Chris_Young_80640

@Rickard Modig — The reason that Heston was probably adding tap water was that they were using a commercial puree that was concentrated (probably from Boiron, which is the brand we regularly used when I was at The Fat Duck).

Rickard_Modig_19323

Makes a lot of sense. I recognize that brand and I should be able to get it through work.

I went to the library yesterday to read The Fat Duck Cookbook and he did start with fresh blackcurrants for his blackcurrant juice, macerating them in a sugar syrup for 6 hours at 60 degrees C.

I also looked through On Food And Cooking. I gather that you want to raise the temperature to break down cell walls and deactivate enzymes, but not so high that flavor compounds are destroyed or evaporated. Do you think 6 hours at 60 C would do the trick for a sorbet base as well?

Can you recommend any books or other resources on the topic where I can learn more about the underlying reasoning?

Thanks for your time, always appreciate learning from you.