yisba’s kitchen alchemy – sherbet

I like to make things in general, and I like to try out new recipes. I especially like eating/drinking something and having the thought “I wonder if I could make this myself at home?”.

Recently I had this thought about sherbet. I’m a big Sherbet Dip Dab fiend, and I was curious if I could make some sherbet for myself in order to put it in the bath tub and roll around in it eat it whenever I felt like.

To my delight, it’s incredibly easy to make at home!

So, after extensive testing of quantities, here is Yisba’s Sherbet (or ‘Yisbet’) recipe:

Ingredients:

2 tsp citric acid powder
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
3 tsp powdered jelly (any flavour you like!)
1 cup icing sugar

Method:

1. Put 2 tsp citric acid powder into a bowl. If it has a lot of crystals in it, grind it up into a fine powder either with an electric grinder or a mortar and pestel. Important! - Try not to breath in the powder, the acidic powder will sting your nose and make you cough!

2. Put 2 tsp bicarb into the citric acid. Mix the two with a spoon, again try not to breath in.

3. Put 3 tsp powdered jelly into the mixture, and mix again.

4. Weigh out 1 cup icing sugar into a separate bowl. Sieve this into your other ingredients. Keep your sugar bowl, you’ll need it again soon.

5. Give the whole lot a good mix through with a spoon. Get right down into all the crannies! The powder will probably stay white, so it is hard to tell when it is mixed thoroughly. You can only do that by taste ;)

6. Take the bowl you had your sugar in, and sieve your sherbet back into it. This will help to mix the ingredients further. Do this a few more times back and forth into your bowls, just to make sure.

7. Here’s a fun part – take a clean finger and dip it into the sherbet and taste it. Do this into several places in the sherbet (with different clean fingers!) If the taste is the same throughout, you’re done! Keep sieving and mixing until you’re satisfied.

Top Tips:

You can buy powdered jelly in a variety of flavours and bicarb from any supermarket. You can buy citric acid from health food shops, home brew shops, chemists and we get ours from our local halal shop which is the cheapest and the biggest packet.

Use as fine a sieve as you can lay your hands on – you want all the pesky lumps and crystals to disappear to leave a fine ground powder.

Pat the sides of the sieve, don’t force the powder through with a spoon – you might also force in a crystal.

Whenever you find large crystals in the bottom of the sieve, take them out and either re-grind them if there are lots, or throw them away if there are only a few.

The citric acid makes the sherbet sour and tangy, the bicarb makes it fizzy and the jelly makes it a certain flavour. Depending on which one of those you want the sherbet to be like the most, try altering the amounts of each to suit your own taste. Keep these ingredients to less that about 4 tsp each per cup of sugar though, or the sherbet will be too strong.

The amount in this recipe is meant to be split into portions, sherbet Dip Dabs contain around 25g in a packet - please don’t try eating the whole lot at once!


When you’ve made the sherbet, take a lolly or a licorice stick and tuck in - try not to eat it all at once though ;)



(Disclaimer - just to be clear, this recipe is meant to be fun and tasty. Please enjoy this at your own risk, I cannot take any responsibility for any injury or illness sustained while making or consuming this recipe)