In honor of my trip to Paris (that I’m sadly returning home from today), I’m sharing two French-influenced recipes this month. French gastronomy is as legendary as it is heavenly and no conversation about the genre can be had without the inclusion of champagne. Due to the fact Los Angeles is still experiencing temperatures in the high 70’s, I decided a classic champagne cocktail wouldn’t do and created today’s strawberry champagne sorbet recipe with the last of the year’s hot summer nights in mind.
Champagne evolved into the sparkling wine associated with northeastern France over centuries. Champenois wine makers in the region were envious of the rich reds produced in the milder south and attempted time and time again to create a wine comparable to the full bodied Burgundies of their neighbors. Unfortunately, the colder temperatures of the north made it harder for grapes to fully ripen, often leading to lighter and highly acidic end results.
The chill also led to risk of the fermentation process prematurely stopping. One of the products of fermentation is the release of carbon dioxide gas. When wine is bottled before this process has run its course, the gas becomes trapped in the wine itself. This causes intense pressure and often resulted in the much-thinner early bottles of wine exploding. Even those that did not explode were seen as sub-par because they contained an unacceptable amount of bubbles.
By the late 17tth and early 18th centuries bubbly wine from the region was becoming more acceptable and gained fame with the French nobility as well as the British. As the sparkling wine continued to grow in popularity, Champenois wine makers began attempting to make their wines sparkle deliberately. At the time they were still unsure of the science behind the process and were thus unable to effectively control the end result.
A century later, with a basic understanding of the importance of the fermentation process in hand, the champagne industry was born. French champagne house Veuve Clicquot developed a method to produce large-scale quantities of the bubbly beverage and the rest is history.
Today’s recipe for strawberry champagne sorbet would please the original wine makers greatly because the end product contains very few of the drink’s infamous bubbles. It also contains next to no alcohol which means those of you who don’t drink can still indulge in this tasty treat.
I dare you to eat just one!
- Combine champagne and sugar in a saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat.
- Reduce to medium heat and simmer for 5 minutes. (You must simmer for 5 minutes to burn off the alcohol. If you skip this step the mixture will not freeze.)
- Blend strawberries and water until smooth. You may not need a full cup of water depending on how juicy your strawberries are. The water’s only purpose is to make the strawberry pulp less dense.
- Combine champagne mixture and strawberries in a baking pan and stir. Refrigerate mixture overnight.
- In the morning, put the dish in the freezer until frozen (approximately 5 hours). When you're ready to serve, scoop the sorbet into bowls or glasses and garnish as you please.
Note: If you are going to keep the sorbet in the freezer longer than a few hours prior to serving you may want to stir it every few hours to loosen the mixture. If it becomes too hard to serve at any point remove the pan from the freezer and place on the counter for 5-10 minutes to soften.