Recipe for success: Green apple rosemary sorbet

As promised, I tackled the recreation of the green apply rosemary sorbet we had during the Niche tasting menu last week. Lawyerchefgirl and I had laid out a plan on how this should be executed and we thought we would both attempt the plan and see how it went. The plan went a little something like this:

1. Steep the fresh rosemary in water.
   Author's note part I: I used rosemary brought in from my herb garden so I feel really cool. Feel free to roll your eyes.


2. Take the rosemary out of the water and use the herbed water to make simple syrup, let cool. (Simple syrup is sugar dissolved over heat in an equal part of water.)


3. Meanwhile, juice Granny Smith green apples. I bought a 3 pound bag and juiced them all.
   Author's note part II: since you can't just go to the store and pick up a half gallon of Granny Smith green apple juice, this has to been done with a juicer at home (but it does add cool points for the level of scratchness you are attempting). I peeled and cut the apples and I was extremely pleased with the beautiful light green color I was getting from these perfectly tart little apples. I turned around to prepare more apples only to return to a cup of brown apple juice! Yes, friends, if I had thought about this for 2 seconds I would have pre-realized that the browning of the apple juice was inevitable. So I set the browned batch aside and started juicing more apples, periodically adding lemon to the juice and placing the finished juice in the fridge as soon as it was complete. This method staved off the browning process for the most part, but the color was a little off.


4. Once the simple syrup and apple juice is complete, combine the two to your liking.


5. Put the mixture in your ice cream maker and...follow the manufacturer's directions.

So how did it turn out? Surprisingly well. The sorbet I made was a bit sweeter than the tasting menu version, but I think the taste was similar. The rosemary adds such a refreshing element that we thought perhaps mint was also added to the original, but I didn't add any mint and got the same refreshing flavor. The only drawback was the color. While the original had a lovely pale green color, mine had darkened a bit and was akin to pale pea soup. So that wasn't the same.

From one taster that had both the original and the recreation, I got the exclusive interview: "It was good. Do you want more than that? ... It had a nice tartness to it. You could taste the rosemary, but it didn't overpower the sorbet like it could have." So there you have it.