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.
You know your fruit/cheese observation is not too strange (well to me anyway). Maybe a watermelon and mint sorbet with a tiny sprinkle of feta cheese? That is the first other melon combo I could think of when I read this post.
This dessert is double cooling because I read that the affect of the melon in salad is to re hydrate you in hot climates. Anyway I bound to try this combo once in my life, so I might as well start now!
I’m curious about your machine. An ice cream maker? What brand?
Georgia, the machine I used is a Chinese brand, Caple. It has its own compressor/cooling system but I used to have an ice cream maker that was practically an ice-bucket and a turner, and it works just the same.
Hi I really like your photography style. May I get to know if you have a specific shooting room for the dark-black layout? which camera/lens you use?
Thank you very much and look forward to hear from you.
Ms. Liang
Liang: Hi, the background is just a black wood board. I used Canon 650D camera with a 50mm f1.8 lens.