One Bad Apple Don't Spoil The Whole Bunch...

Nobody is perfect. Despite my generally high success rate for trying new recipes, I really ought to consider myself fortunate, because this weekend I finally made one that was a dud. At Mom's request, I was trying to recreate a green apple sorbet that she had sampled at a lavish, multi-course dinner party a couple months ago, which she described as tasting like "cold liquid apples." Knowing my proclivity for creating frozen desserts during the summer months, she asked me to try my hand at making an apple sorbet of my own. However, since I didn't try it myself, I didn't exactly have a lot to go on in terms of inspiration, so I turned to the ordinarily fool-proof recipes of David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop, where I found a recipe for Green Apple and Sparkling Cider sorbet that sounded promising.

Sadly, for the first time, one of Lebovitz's recipes let me down. After trekking to the liquor store to track down calvados, the French apple brandy native to the region of Normandy, finding dry non-alcoholic sparkling apple cider at the grocery store, and chopping, cooking, and cooking a pile of green apples in a mixture of cider and some sugar, I had high hopes for my creation. However, after pureeing the fruit and its accompanying liquid (all of which had turned a rather unappealing shade of brown after steeping the gently-cooked apples in the liquid for almost an hour without any lemon juice, as per the instructions), when I added the calvados and took a taste, the unfrozen mix tasted suspiciously like Mott's applesauce. I tried to reserve judgment, as many sorbets don't taste the same before churning as they do after being frozen, but I ended up being proven right. All of my effort resulted in a frozen dessert that tasted like frozen grocery store applesauce.

The texture was odd also: despite the presence of alcohol, which usually lowers the freezing point of sorbets to make them softer and more scoopable, the apple sorbet turned out almost crumbly, like a granita. Still, I shared the sorbet with Mom, since she had been the one to request it in the first place, but she echoed my assessment of it as not being very good, and she was disappointed that it didn't live up to her memory of the original apple sorbet that so inspired her palate.


I'm not going to type up the recipe, because I don't think it's worth making, but I did want to share this experience here to add a touch of reality to the portrait of my life that I'm creating here. I have my bad days in the kitchen just like everyone else. At least I tried to do something nice for my mom, but now I'll be moving on to other (hopefully better) things in my recipe experimentation queue. C'est la vie.