My Daddy grows the Limes

There are certain things I come across food wise that I tend to get some might say irrationally excited about. The bacon for one, though I do guarantee it is good bacon, another is the limes that my Dad grows in his backyard in Bendigo.
They are Tahitian Limes and they grow on a smallish tree he has by the steps to the back veranda. I should really stop tormenting you with ingredients and then not give you the means to go get them yourselves so I will tell you that you can buy Tahitian limes at various markets in Melbourne, they are grown up in Queensland and shipped down at various times through out the year. I still won’t tell you where the Bacon deli is though, I’ve given you enough clues to its location and I don’t really feel like giving those people more business than they already have.
Enough of the character assassination, back to the limes.
The limes from Dad’s tree I usually pick when they are green but you can leave them to go yellow on the tree and they are still fantastically tasty. They have this kind of lemony, limey, lemonade flavour to them, if you can remember the taste of green icy poles from when you were a kid, that flavour they had that could only really be described as green, well that’s what these limes taste like and every part of them has variations on the intensity of that one flavour. When you pick them you can smell it on the surface of the skin and taste it in the zest as well. I use them in a heap of things, on chicken or fish, in dressings and cakes. I made a lime and coconut cake with them once which was quite nice. But my favorite way of using them is in this Lime and Green Apple Sorbet.
When thinking of a recipe I tend to not just stop at thinking about how something will go together and different flavors that might compliment each other, I tend to think about how it will be tasted by whoever I’m serving it to. In what order different flavors will hit their palate and with what strength, and also the texture in the mouth and what the person might be reminded of when tasting whatever the dish might be.
I also like little tricks, like magic tricks, ingredients that might be a huge part of the dish but are totally unrecognizable in the flavour or a way of preparing something that makes the final result a little unexpected. I’ve been playing a little with the whole idea of molecular gastronomy but really just don’t have all the wiz bang equipment that a girl really needs to do it justice. I wanted with my Lime and Green Apple sorbet to keep everything as smooth and fine as possible so that when it hits your mouth it just dissolves and all you are left with is the flavour, like the sorbet did some kind of disappearing act.
I took a rough photo of the sorbet so you could see how it was presented but when serving this for a dessert I would take the sorbet right from the freezer without letting it soften and use a hot metal spoon to scrape it into clouds so that it just needed the smallest amount of heat to dissolve in the mouth. I serve it with a touch of blackcurrant syrup at the bottom of the glass as a kind of reminiscence I suppose. When I was a kid we would always be sent to school with apple and blackcurrant Breaka box drinks, if you’re in your late 20’s now you might remember them as well. You used to get them from the supermarket in packs of 6 and they had stickers on them that everyone would collect like teenage mutant ninja turtles or he-man and the masters of the universe or some generic break dancing thing. So the blackcurrant is just a little hark back to the playground at lunchtime when I drink my box drink and pretend it was fine wine. I got a shock when I finally tasted what wine was like I can tell you.


Lime and Green Apple Sorbet
I have two pieces of equipment that make this recipe really quite easy but with persistence they could be made without them. One is my ice cream maker which I bought for roughly $50 at Myers and the other is the food processor which my brother got me for Christmas (Thanks John). I do think you need the food processor to get the sorbet to a really fine texture but you don’t have to have the ice cream maker if you don’t already have one just put the mix into a shallow metal or plastic container and got the fridge every 45 mins to whisk it and make sure that ice crystals aren’t forming. You wont get as smooth a texture but it will still be tasty.
Make yourself a sugar syrup of one part sugar one part water and let this cool. Basically to make a sugar syrup you just combine your portions of sugar and water and bring it to the boil in a sauce pan making sure that all the sugar has dissolved. Core 4 or 5 green apples, leave the skin on coz it adds to colour and squeeze over the juice of at least 4 limes. Blend in the food processor and add about 800mls of sugar syrup, keep blending until there are no huge lumps, its still going to be lumpy but you want to try and get as much flavour out of it as you can taste the mix at this point and see if you need to add anything to balance the flavour correctly you want to make sure its pleasantly acid but you can still taste that fresh green that you want. Strain through a fine sieve using a spoon to push as much pulp through as you can. Strain a second time. Let the mix chill in the fridge before putting into your ice cream maker, with mine I have to make sure the mix is cold but if you have a fantastic ice cream maker that can chill sorbet just by looking at it then omit this step its not for taste its for machinery. Because this is a sorbet and it contains no fat it doesn’t matter how long you churn it for because you don’t have to worry about it splitting like ice cream, I tend to churn it till its smooth and silky and then let it get a little firmer in the freezer. To serve get a mug of boiling hot water to heat your spoon and scrape the surface of the sorbet to get clouds rather than anything that resembles quenelles or something like that. You want this sorbet to be soft and fluffy. A touch of blackcurrant syrup in the bottom if you care for it but the other thing that goes really nicely at the bottom of the glass is rose cordial which you can get from any Arabic grocer the perfume of the rose cordial goes really well with the lime