Mexican Mango Sorbet

It's Birthday Week here at Casa de Fehling and to kick off the festivities for my thirty third year of life, I started by making a Mexican Mango Sorbet.

Mangoes were on sale at the grocery store last week, so I got really excited to try and make mango ice cream. It turned out, there were a few problems with that. First off, when I got to the store, the mangoes were all hard and green. You can't work with that! I ended up buying six and sticking them in a paper bag to ripen when I got home. You gotta love the paper bag trick.

Well, then me being me, I totally forgot about them until a week later. Whoops. When I opened up the bag, not only were they now ripe, three of them had started to get spots where they were spoiling on the side. I was so bummed! So much for my savings. Then I figured, you know what? There is no reason to waste the side of the fruit that is not spoiled since I'm cutting them up anyway. So that's what I did. I think I lost about a mango's worth of fruit, which is better than three.

Then I started to look for mango ice cream recipes online. This was the third problem. I couldn't find one that I liked! All of them called for half and half, no eggs - that is NOT ice cream. Sure, I could have made a plain vanilla and just tossed in the mango chunks, but that's no fun. Then I started thinking about sorbet.

One thing I've learned from all my time in the kitchen is that once you have the basics for any type of recipe down, it becomes really easy to modify it and even make up whole new ones based on the principles of the original. The first sorbet I made was strawberry, based on a recipe I found on the Chloe Conspiracy. After I made that a whole bunch of times I mixed it up and tried it with blackberries. Same recipe, just substituting one kind of berry for the other. Easy.

Well, now it was time to try something new. Originally I was going to go with a straight mango sorbet. I planned to just substitute the mango for the berries in the recipe. Then I remembered these:

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that most of the Mexican little kids around these parts have had one of these at one time or another. It's a mango flavored lollipop that's encrusted with chili powder. I know. It sounds gross, and to tell you the truth, it doesn't look particularly appetizing either. But the flavor is AMAZING. Something about the chili really makes the sweetness of the candy pop. It's the same principle that's at work in the Chocolate Chipotle cupcakes you find in gourmet cupcake shops.

This was going to be the flavor on which I based my sorbet. Not only that, I'd sort of be winging it since I didn't have an actual recipe, just a guideline. What could go wrong?

First up, you need the flesh of about five mangoes. If you don't know how to peel/seed a mango, look here. While you're doing that, make a simple syrup. Pour one cup filtered water into a small saucepan and add 3/4 cups sugar. Give it a stir, bring it to a boil, then let it boil for one minute. Remove it from the heat and let cool.

In a blender, combine your simple syrup, the mangoes, the zest of a lime (wash it before zesting!), the juice of that same lime, and four teaspoons of chili powder. Yes, it seems like a lot. No it will not be spicy. I promise. I'm eating some right now!

Puree until smooth.

Freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's directions. My ice cream maker is a Krups La Glaciere and it's ten years old this week. It's the very first gift that my husband bought me, and it was for my 23rd birthday the year that we met. I love this thing!

Of course, if you had the popsicle molds that I've been coveting lately, you could also put this in there and have popsicles too. I had to be satisfied with scooping mine into a dish and eating it with a spoon, but it's good that way too. Bubba agreed. The mango loses some of it's over the top sweetness because it's tempered with all the lime. The chili powder adds another dimension of flavor without being spicy or biting at all.

This is good stuff!