melon sorbet and white cheese

As I have some life to deal with today, I’m going to quickly leave you with’mmm… more of an idea than a recipe per se.  Three years ago during our fascinating trip to Istanbul, as any cool-faced tourists with telling peek-ish eyes, we sat at nearly every meal scratching our cameras and baffled – what’s up with the plate of melons at everyone’s table, and more importantly, where’s mine?

Finally two days in and too many melon-less meals later I’ve had it up there.  I moved slightly sideways with my uncertain fingers and tapped the gentleman sitting next to us who was having a lovely conversation which probably should not have been interrupted (if it was you, late apologies… beautiful fedora by the way), and performed a little episode of what I called Universal Traveling Body Language.  Pointed at the melons → palms up and shrugged my shoulders → smile.  Hey, it works every time.  Turned out, HA!  Melon’s for cheese.

It was a concept quite strange yet invigorating.  I mean figs and blue cheese with honey after meals, yes.  Melon and white cheese as an appetizer?  COOL!  I mean like literally “cool” because I can’t think of anything else more  refreshing to induce appetite when it’s like what-is-it-now… HELL-STORM TORCHING outside!  Wait wait, actually… I can.  I mean since it’s such as summery thing, why not SUMMER THE HELL out of it?  So here, a mid-summer mediterranean dream for you to combat a season that makes everything melt.  Well, better the sorbet than my face.

Taking my boy to the doc now.  Wish me luck ~

The most important thing is to use fully ripen, juicy melons for this recipe.  Unripe melons, not only has flavourless/hard flesh, but will not yield much of juice from the center/seeds which we are going to make the syrup from.  This juice which usually get discarded, carries a lot of intense melon flavours.

Ingredients:

• Melon sorbet:
  • 800 grams of ripen melon flesh (approx 1 ~ 1.5 melon)
  • 1/3 cup (78 ml) of melon juice (collected from the center and seeds)
  • 1/3 ~ 1/2 (100 grams) cup of sugar (depending on the sweetness of the melon)
  • 2 tbsp of lemon juice
• Slices of mediterranean-style mild semi-soft feta such as:
  • Dodoni goat cheese katsiki
  • Turkish white cheese/Beyaz peynir

Remove the skin of the melon and cut in half.  Scrape off the center fibers/seeds into a strainer with a bowl at the bottom to catch the juice.  Press on the fibers/seeds to extract as much juice as you can (adding a tbsp of water helps the thick liquid fall through the sieve).  You should have about 1/3 cup, but if not, just add water to make up to 1/3 cup.  Add the juice along with sugar and lemon juice to a small pot.  Bring to a simmer over medium heat until the sugar has melted.  Blend the melon flesh and the melon juice/syrup in a blender until extremely smooth, approx 1 ~ 2 min.  Chill the mixture in the fridge for a few hours, or until completely chilled through.

Turn the mixture into sorbet using your ice-cream machine according to manufacture’s instructions.  Freeze the sorbet inside a container in the freezer until harden.

Serve the sorbet with a slice of mediterranean semi-soft feta cheese.