Ice cream, parfait, sorbet, gelato, granita. Creamy, fruity, icy and smooth, here are some of my favourite frozen dessert recipes.
Yes, you can and should rechurn leftover or melted ice cream and sorbet. Homemade ice cream is best served fresh, but in restaurants, ice cream and sorbet that isn’t served the same day is often melted and churned again to maintain a smooth texture. This is a chef’s tip that most homecooks don’t know.
The main difference between sorbet, sherbet, ice cream and other frozen desserts lies in whether egg or dairy are added and also how much air is churned into the mixture. See below for details.
Sorbet (sorbetto in Italian) is fruit puree and sugar that’s churned until smooth then frozen. Sorbet is typically dairy-free and egg-free.
Sherbet is sorbet (fruit and sugar) with dairy added. Sherbet is egg-free.
Traditional French ice cream is custard-based so contains dairy (usually cream as the name suggests) and egg.
While traditional French ice cream is based on custard and so contains dairy and egg, Philadelphia-style ice cream (also called American ice cream or New York ice cream) is egg-free. It’s also quicker to make containing just cream, sugar and flavouring.
Gelato is the Italian word for ice cream. Gelato starts out with a similar base to traditional ice cream but it has a higher proportion of milk and a lower proportion of cream and eggs, or is sometimes egg-free. Gelato is churned at a much slower rate than ice cream and so incorporates less air. The lower fat content and less air means that gelato is denser than traditional ice cream with a more intense flavour.
Granita is a frozen dessert that’s been repeatedly scraped while freezing rather than being churned, giving it a crunchier, icier texture than ice cream or sorbet. Granita is usually dairy-free and egg-free.
Parfait is an ice cream mixture that is frozen without churning, so it contains less air and is icier and less creamy than regular ice cream. Semifreddo (meaning semi-frozen in Italian) is similar to parfait. Parfait and semi-freddo are easy to make as they don’t require an ice cream machine.
Adding invert sugars to a frozen dessert mixture ensures a smooth, scoopable texture. Glucose and corn syrup are invert sugars that are often added to ice cream and sorbet mixtures to prevent them crystallising as they freeze.
Not all sugars behave the same way in cooking. Glucose is an invert sugar that’s often added to frozen desserts to give a smoother texture as it doesn’t crystallise the way the simpler sugars (sucrose and fructose) do. Corn syrup and the syrup from poached fruit do the same job.
