After spending a day working in your yard under the hot sun, nothing hits the spot like a sweet, cool sorbet.  While I have always been a fan of sorbets it wasn’t until I got my Cuisinart Ice Cream maker that I realized how easy they were to make. 

Finding the Right Recipe
If you do a Google search for sorbet you’ll undoubtedly find thousands of variations on the basic sorbet, each incorporating a different kind of fruit.  While Lemon Sorbet is by far the most popular, I’ve been looking for a sound Lime Sorbet recipe without much luck.

I was interested in a straightforward recipe that didn’t use egg whites or alcohol to preserve a soft mouthfeel, but the few Lime Sorbet recipes I was able to find all had a component that turned me off. 

Take for example this recipe from Cuisinart that came with my Ice Cream Maker.  The recipe uses a Lemon Sorbet recipe as a base, but explains how you can use lime juice instead of lemon juice for lime sorbet.  I actually started making this recipe, but after measuring out the 6 CUPS (!) of sugar, I couldn’t go any further.  That’s almost an entire bag of sugar!  This is what it looked like in my saucepan:

Using some other sorbet recipes as a foundation I came up with this simple recipe:

Lime Sorbet Recipe
2 Cups Sugar
2 Cups Water
1 Cup Lime Juice (Freshly Squeezed!)
1 Tablespoon Lime Zest

Making the Mix
Like any sorbet, this one starts off by making a simple sugar.  Place the 2 Cups of Water, the 2 Cups of Sugar and I added a few pinches of the zest into a saucepan for color.  Stir on medium high heat until the mix starts to boil. The goal here is to get the sugar completely dissolved into the water.  You’ll be able to tell when you’ve got it right because the color of the liquid will change.  You’ll start looking something like this:

See how it’s cloudy?  You can’t see the bottom there can you? Now once its perfectly dissolved, it should look like this:

See the difference?  You can see the bottom pretty clearly now.  Take this off of the heat and let cool.  You’ll eventually want to put it in the refrigerator to get cold, but wait until its cool to the touch, no need heating up your refrigerator.

While that is cooling you can get to the fun part, smashing the hell out of some limes.  It should take about a dozen a limes to get a cups worth of juice. Now most people have some sort of device for this task which enables them to easily extract the juice from said limes.  I unfortunately did not.

It took a bit to get the juice out but here was my method:

1. Roll the whole lime on the counter putting some pressure on it.
2. Cut the lime in half.
3. Turn the lime inside-out.
4. Turn back rightside-out.
5. Squeeze the hell out of it.
6. Curse myself for biting my nails.

I was able to get a cup out of only nine small limes, so it can be done, but it’s not pretty:

An important step to remember is to strain the juice.  You don’t want all of that pulp or seeds in your sorbet, so run it through a strainer:
 
Now we just have to put everything together.  Pour your strained lime juice into your simple syrup and stir in the remaining zest.  Put this in the fridge to chill out for about an hour.

Colder than Ice
If you have an electric ice cream maker, you’ll enjoy the next part.  It’s freezin’ time yo! Depending on whether or not you have an electric ice cream maker, choose wisely:

I don’t have an ice cream maker!
Don’t be afraid if you don’t have an electric ice cream maker, you can still make some delicious sorbet.  All you need to do is place your mix in a rectangular cake pan and freeze.  Every half an hour or so you’ll need to scrape the ice with a fork, but eventually you’ll get to the point where you have some nice flaky lime ice.  It won’t be the same as using an ice cream maker, but its pretty close.

Ice Cream Maker Owners
Place your frozen core into the machine, assemble the other parts and turn on the machine.  Slowly, pour the mixture into your ice cream machine.  In about a half an hour you’ll have some soft sorbet.  You’ll find that this melts pretty quickly, so work fast to get it into storage.

Storing the Lime Sorbet
I like to store my sorbet in small plastic containers with lids.  Those disposable plastic containers they sell at the grocery store work great for this. 

Get your sorbet into the freezer as quickly as possible to prevent thawing.  As it sits in the freezer the sorbet will firm up, but you’ll want to eat it within a week or you’ll have freezerburn city on your hands.  I doubt it will last that long though.

Enjoying your creation
While the sorbet is great right out of the ice cream maker, I like to let mine chill for a bit in the freezer to give it some more body.  If you’re sorbet gets too hard in the freezer, leave it out on the counter for 10 minutes and it should be a perfect consistency.