Cherry Granita

It's almost absurd how the CC has never posted this.

Ingredients

2 lbs cherries

2 tbsp white sugar

2 lemons (or 2 limes)

dash of salt

Note 1: You absolutely need the sour part. Otherwise the mixture will taste bland on serving. It's how our tongues work.

Recipe

Pit the cherries. The CC knows that this is serious work. Buy a pitter (seriously, the only "special purpose" device that the CC owns!)

Blend them with the ingredients in a blender. Filter them through a sieve into a bowl.

Stick the mixture into your freezer. Every hour you need to scrape it. What this really does is turn everything into ice crystals.

Is this work? Not really, if you set a timer.

Serve scooped in a martini glass - preferably with a basil leaf!

Machine Madness

Nothing inspires the purchase of a gadget than the daunting task of having to do it by hand.

In a spirit of exuberant culinary madness the CC purchased a few pounds of cherries at the farmers' market.

The object? Cherry granita.

After pitting the first four cherries by hand, the CC went out and purchased a cherry-pitter.

The same thing happened a few years ago when the juice of 40 lemons beckoned. After the second lemon, it sank in really quickly what one was up against, and a juicer was purchased.

Reality has a rude tendency of intruding on culinary flights of fancy.

Cherry Granita

Ingredients

2 lb cherries (pitted)
1 tbsp sea salt
2 tbsp lime juice (read below)

Recipe

Blend the cherries in a blender. Pass through a fine sieve.

Add the salt, and the lime juice depending on the tartness of the cherries. You want the final mixture to be quite liquid, slightly salty, and on the tarter side.

Put it in the freezer. Every hour initially, break up the ice as it forms. After a while, you will need to break it up every half hour or so, and then every fifteen minutes. Takes about 6-7 odd hours in summer (which is when you want it anyway.)

Gelato outside Italy

This blog has never done an endorsement but the CC is going to make an extreme exception for this company.

They make, hands down, the best gelatos and granitas the CC has eaten either inside or outside Italy, and this Italian boutique just opened a chain up the street from the CC.

Yes, it's super pricy (but cheaper than a flight to Italy,) and it's packed with a line of yuppies out the door (but you get the same yuppies in Milan!)

They are called GROM.

Meyer-Lemon Granita recipe

Ingredients

20 Meyer-lemons
8 tbsp sugar (this is approximate, read below.)
infinite patience (traditionally in short supply!)

Method

Squeeze the lemons, and put the juice through a fine sieve (you only want the liquid.) Add the sugar one tbsp at a time, and stir until it dissolves. You want to end up with a solution that's still quite tart but has a sweet-sour taste (trust me, this works well in the end even as a "dessert" -- the first time the CC made a granita, it was too sweet.)

Now comes the hard part. Put the stuff in a large bowl, and place it in the freezer uncovered. As it starts freezing, stir it up.

Initially, you can wait upto 2-3 hours in summer. After that, you'll need to do it every hour, then every half-hour, then every 15 minutes, until you end up with ice-crystals that are "quite dry" (like powdered snowflakes.)

Scoop and serve in martini glasses. The flavor crystals explode in your mouth.

The Italians may not know how to form a government, but they know how to eat well.

Ode to a Meyer-lemon granita

It looks like yellow snow,
But it tastes like ambrosia.


Not exactly Keats but it pretty much sums up the situation aptly.