Tomato sorbet with basil and balsamic

A sorbet that tastes like caprese on a spoon. Sweet, salty and sharp all at once — and surprisingly refreshing.

The tomato is botanically a fruit, but it holds barely five grams of sugar per hundred. A sorbet made from it therefore needs a lot of added sugar, or it freezes not like a sorbet but like an ice cube. The salt and balsamic vinegar are not there for novelty: salt draws out the tomato glutamate and pushes the sorbet towards food, and the vinegar adds an acidity that survives the cold.

Type: Sorbet · Servings: 8 · Difficulty: Easy

Equipment

Ingredients

  • 600 g tomato passata (sieved tomatoes) (sieved tomatoes, no salt or herbs added)
  • 100 g water
  • 200 g granulated sugar (sucrose)
  • 40 g dextrose (glucose powder)
  • 40 g glucose syrup (DE 40, 80 % solids)
  • 12 g fresh basil (leaves) (leaves from one small bunch)
  • 30 g balsamic vinegar
  • 20 g lemon juice (fresh)
  • 2 g salt

Making the mix

  1. Heat the water with the granulated sugar, dextrose and glucose syrup to 80 °C, stirring until the syrup is clear.
  2. Take the pan off the heat, drop the basil leaves into the hot syrup, cover and infuse for 10 minutes. No longer — basil turns bitter and dark with time.
  3. Strain the syrup, squeezing and discarding the leaves.
  4. Add the passata, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice and salt to the syrup and blend briefly with a stick blender.
  5. Taste it. The sorbet should read clearly salty as well as sweet — freezing mutes both by about a third.
  6. Chill the mix below 5 °C and let it rest in the fridge for at least 4 hours; the flavours knit together in that time.

Method — Compressor ice cream maker

  1. Switch the ice cream maker on 5–10 minutes in advance so the bowl can pre-chill.
  2. Give the aged mix a quick blitz with a stick blender and pour it into the bowl, no higher than the fill line. Churn for 25–35 minutes, until it thickens and clings to the paddle.
  3. Transfer to a chilled tub, press cling film onto the surface and leave to harden in the freezer for 2 hours.

Total time: 7 h 25 min

Method — Freezer-bowl ice cream maker

  1. Take the bowl, frozen for at least 24 hours, out of the freezer just before use, fit the paddle and switch the machine on.
  2. With the machine running, pour in the well-chilled, freshly blended mix — filling the bowl no more than two-thirds.
  3. Churn for 20–30 minutes, until the mix thickens to a soft cream. There is no point going longer — by then the bowl has warmed up.
  4. Transfer to a chilled tub, cover with cling film and leave to harden in the freezer for 3 hours.

A freezer bowl only partly freezes the mix, so the ice cream takes longer to harden and tends to be slightly less smooth than from a compressor machine. A thoroughly chilled, properly aged mix helps.

Total time: 8 h 20 min

Method — No-machine method

  1. Pour the chilled mix into a shallow metal container and put it in the freezer.
  2. After 45 minutes, stir it thoroughly with a whisk or stick blender — work the frozen edges into the centre.
  3. Repeat every 30 minutes, 4–5 times in all, until the mass is thick and smooth.
  4. Leave to harden for another hour.

Without a machine the sorbet comes out grainier, closer to a granita. With this flavour that is no loss — a coarse tomato ice makes an excellent starter.

Total time: 8 h 55 min

Stages

Preparation
15 min
Cooking
10 min
Cooling
30 min
Ageing in the fridge
4 h
Churning
30 min
Hardening in the freezer
2 h
Total time
7 h 25 min

Plan: what to do and when

The whole recipe takes 7 h 25 min, of which 25 min is hands-on — the rest is waiting you can spend elsewhere.

The making itself fits into a single day — start at least 7 h 25 min before serving.

  • Prepare the mix (weigh and stir the ingredients) — 15 min
  • Cook the mix — 10 min
  • Cool the mix down — 30 min
  • Let the mix age in the fridge — 4 h
  • Churn in the machine — 30 min
  • Let it harden in the freezer — 2 h

Serving and storage

Serve it in small glasses as a starter or between courses: drizzled with olive oil, with ground black pepper, a basil leaf and perhaps a piece of mozzarella. As a dessert it works alongside a scoop of olive oil gelato. Let it stand for 5–10 minutes and run a spoon across the surface before scooping — sorbets harden faster than dairy ice creams.

In a sealed tub it keeps for 1–2 weeks, but it is best within three days — after that the crystals coarsen and the flavour fades.

Tips

  • The passata must be tomatoes and nothing else. Ready-made sauces with onion, sugar and herbs do not work here.
  • In summer use fresh ripe tomatoes: peel and deseed 800 g and blend — that gives about 600 g of purée. The flavour is incomparable, but check the sweetness.
  • Choose a thick, sweet balsamic. A thin, sharp vinegar only sours the whole sorbet.

Why it works

Passata holds around 4.8 g of sugar per 100 g, so 600 g brings barely 29 g — the rest has to come from the sugar jar. Hence roughly 300 g of sugars in total: they bring Brix to 29 (sorbet runs 24–34) and PAC to 35.4 (range 26–42). The salt does two jobs: in flavour it lifts the glutamate tomatoes are rich in, and in the calculation it counts as an anti-freezing agent, so those two grams soften the sorbet a touch further. The glucose syrup is there for texture — its dextrins barely raise the PAC but bind water and keep the crystals fine.

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How we calculate the composition · What PAC and POD mean · Balance this mix in the calculator

Sources