This is a super simple and fast sorbet recipe. It follows in the steps of the pistachio sorbet that I previously described, but this recipe blends in a single step (instead of blending, freezing, then re-blending). The trick is to start with nut butter instead of whole nuts. Flavor-wise, I love the honey-peanut combination.
For measuring sticky things like peanut butter and honey, I really like using a digital kitchen scale. It’s too bad that they are not more common in American kitchens! I have this OXO scale, and it’s been great.1 You can put your container on it, tare it (aka “zero it”), and then measure ingredients directly into the container. If you don’t have a scale, eyeballing based on the markings on the side of the container should work.
Ingredients
115 g honey (~⅓ cup)
130 g peanut butter (~½ cup)
365 g ice (~3 cups ice cubes)
2 g salt (½ tsp)
(omit salt if peanut butter is significantly salted)
Makes ~4 servings.
Add ingredients to container, start on low, and quickly ramp up to full speed and use the tamper to push the corners down into the blades. It is important to blend at full speed because otherwise you increase the chances of overheating the motor. Since honey and peanut butter are sticky (and even more so when cold), I found it helpful to pause blending to quickly scrape down the sides with a spatula, and then resume blending until the mixture is smooth. Total blend time was probably about 30 seconds. Do not over blend, because it will start to melt.
The result is delicious, though possibly not quite as smooth (slightly more granular ice crystals) as the two-stage blending described on my pistachio and chocolate sorbet pages.
This sorbet came out as a soft-serve consistency but it would have been firmer if I didn’t stop to take photos. Also, I started with room-temperature peanut butter—if you used peanut butter from the fridge, the result would be a bit more frozen. If you have a hot kitchen, you could also pre-cool the blender container in the fridge before adding the ingredients. One other trick is to cool the bowls that you will eat out of in the freezer so that the sorbet does not start melting the second you serve it.
Temperatures can vary, so if you end up with more of a milkshake consistency, you can add more ice cubes to get it to freeze, or you could revert back to the blend, freeze, re-blend technique used for the pistachio sorbet.
And finally, one last thing I tried was to freeze the leftover sorbet into popsicle molds.
This is helpful because sorbet can freeze pretty hard. With the popsicles you don’t have to worry about scooping out a rock-hard sorbet because the leftovers are already in convenient single servings. Interestingly, this particular sorbet did not freeze super-hard after going back into the freezer. It worked for popsicles, but a normal container in the freezer would have been fine as well. The popsicles are fun though.
1. I previously used a cheaper scale that stopped working twice. It comes with a 10-year warranty that the company honored, but it didn’t seem worth having to send it back repeatedly. In addition to never malfunctioning, the OXO scale is also just more pleasant to use. ↑