Plum Sorbet

Flushed with success from my first attempts at sorbet, it’s time to head off into the realms of something more interesting. As luck would have it, one of my friends at work was happy to swap a kilo of freshly harvested plums from his tree for a go with my new toy. The way his family reacted to it leads me to suspect he’ll be getting one of his own soon enough.

Plums have a lot more substance to them than lemon juice, so I tried a different base recipe for this with a smaller quantity of a heavier syrup. As ever with such things, processing the fruit took most of the time.


Makes 500ml of sorbet

500g firm plums
100ml water
200g sugar



First we need to get the plums as pureed as possible. Slice them off the stones, keeping the skins (that’s where all the colour is) and put them into a pan. Big chunks is fine, maybe 2 or 3 pieces per plum.

Plums and syrup warming

Slowly heat them up to get the juice out of them, starting to break down the flesh and soften the skins. You shouldn’t need to dilute it with any water if you’re slow enough. When they’ve simmered for 10 minutes or so, blitz to a puree with a stick blender and then push through a sturdy sieve to make it smooth.

Strained plums

Dissolve the sugar into the water to make a heavy syrup and thoroughly mix in the plum juice. Chill it down to to nearly frozen for a couple of hours. At this point, the mixture looked almost orange and tasted fairly sharp.

Chilled down plum syrup

Churn it for 30 minutes in the machine to set the crystals nice and small. This worked in a lot of air to the finished product which made it light enough to cope fine with the tartness of the plums. It came out a subtle shade of pink from the machine, with the edges a deep purple where it froze to the sides without being churned.

Churned plum sorbet

Scoop it into a container and stir through the darker parts to make a nice swirly effect and freeze it for another 15-30 minutes before serving.

Tastes great, even though it’s a pale pastel shade of pink.

This became firm in the freezer overnight, you might want to leave it 5 minutes before serving.

Frozen plum sorbet