Creating your own creamy sorbet from blended frozen fruit and coconut milk is a healthy and refreshing way to use up produce while getting a dose of naturally-sourced antioxidants like Vitamin C. The next time you find yourself with an uneaten carton of berries, a bunch of brown bananas, or a pineapple you don’t know what to do with, dice the fruit and throw it in the freezer. The next day, you can whip up a delicious, no-churn frozen treat without wasting a bite.
The key to this creamy treat lies in its full-fat coconut milk base. This boosts the flavor and texture of the frozen fruit so that when it melts from, say, a warm breeze on a summer evening stroll, it tastes creamy, not watery. Maple syrup and vanilla extract can help enhance the flavor, but if you’re fresh out, don’t fret: since La Dona pineapples come chock-full of natural sugars, you don’t actually need to add sweetener to this recipe.
Unlike the unripe, green-skinned pineapples most folks are used to buying, our pineapples ship by air freight, so they arrive at the grocery store within 48 hours of being picked off the plant. This way, the fruit has more time to mature in the field, increasing its sugar content and deepening in rind color from green to rich gold. If you’ve never had an air pineapple before, you’ll find the flavor much sweeter than expected, noticeably free from the tongue-burning sensation you get from pineapples that were picked, shipped, and bought still green. When combined with creamy coconut milk, the fruit becomes even more lovely. If you could scoop a piña colada into a waffle cone, it would taste like this.
Initially, I couldn’t decide how to classify this recipe–ice cream, sherbet, sorbet? Technically speaking, sorbet denotes a frozen dessert made of fruit, sugar, and sometimes water, while sherbet refers to frozen fruit-and-dairy milk concoctions. Ice cream is, naturally, the creamiest frozen treat variant, made of churned cream, milk, and flavorings. One would think that a coconut-based frozen treat could easily land in any one of these categories, since it doesn’t contain any disqualifying milk solids, yet freezes and melts quite like something that does.So, in the spirit of the whimsicality and delightfulness of frozen treats of all stripes, I went with what sounded prettiest to me. Pineapple coconut sorbet it is!
Serve your sorbet with a dusting of toasted coconut flakes, sliced almonds, or scooped over warm pineapple coconut crisp.
