mutteringhousewife

I may have to do a section on Anything Thermomix Can Do I Can do Almost As Well And A Little Bit Slower.  Those of you who are paying attention know that I attended a Thermomix demo yesterday.  One of the dishes prepared was a strawberry sorbet, and it struck me that this is the kind of thing you could do in a blender.  So this morning I got me a punnet of strawberries and gave it a whack.

The first thing to note is that the Thermomix (or TM as they refer to it in their cookbooks, makes it sound more jolly) jug is two litres, while a random blender you’ve dug out of the corner cupboard has a capacity of about six hundred millilitres.  To make strawberry sorbet in a TM you chuck in a hundred grams of icing sugar (which you can actually make in the TM), a punnet of strawberries, the white of an egg and about a litre of ice.  The blender has the power of twelve jumbo jets, or a classroom of five year olds or something, and turns your ingredients into sorbet in seconds.  I did find it a little dilute, but you needed that amount of ice to make the sorbet instant.

So into my blender went a hundred grams of icing sugar, the white of an egg and a punnet of strawberries.  That kept it occupied for about a minute, but it all blended up in the end and I poured half the result out into another bowl. I added about three hundred millilitres of crushed ice and switched it on.  I can’t believe how much I’ve used the ice function of the fridge I bought as part of my new kitchen last year, I was a determined pooh-pooher from a long way back and just got it to humour the kids.  Anyway, while making some fairly disturbing noises the blender quite suddenly transformed the stuff into a slushy sorbet after about two minutes of hard work.  I poured that out, and, fancying myself as a scientist, put the ice in first this time followed by the strawberry mix to see how that would work out.  It was better the first way, or else I lost patience, but we got there in the end.  You wouldn’t serve this up as is, but it would make an excellent cocktail base.

A couple of hours in the freezer  made it a lot more presentable.  I think the flavour is better with less ice and next time I’ll use less ice again.  The texture is certainly more grainy than that made with a TM, but not unacceptably so.  I’m going to be so popular when the kids get home.  Can’t wait for mangoes to get cheap!