Monday, October 26, 2020

Wallburger

On Sunday I completed another Zealandia By Day tour at 1000. The lucky punters on this particular trip got the bonus tour, and I didn’t finish until 1245.  Overrunning on a tour is fine so long as you check with your group beforehand that they’re not under any time pressure, and are happy to go longer…unlike the cruise ship tours I was doing last summer, where the golden rule is to be back at the Visitor Centre in time for their bus.

As it was, we’d had a great tour with lots of good sightings, but I was hungry! I checked the Burger Wellington app for venues in the CBD to get my burger fix, and decided on Coco’s Bar & Grill. Open for lunch and dinner, it said, so I parked up, and headed to Willeston Street, to find out that it is open for lunch and dinner, except Sundays. “Bah! No matter, I’ll go to Concrete instead” I said to myself. I got to their door (they’re up Cable Car Lane, and upstairs) and it didn’t look particularly open, but I pushed against the door and it opened, so I went upstairs. The next door was locked, however, and I’ve a feeling the one downstairs should have been too, as I had to search around and find the door release to let myself out. Two down, I checked the app again, and looked up Rosie’s Red-Hot Cantina & Taco Joint. This was in Queen’s Wharf, on the dockside, so I figured there was a pretty good chance of them being open. And lo and behold, they were!

If you’ve not heard of Rosie’s, and you live in Wellington, this is probably because they’ve only just opened – on the site previously occupied by Munchen, and before that Chicago Sports Bar. They’re so new, in fact, that when I scanned the QR code for the Covid tracer app, the name still came up as Munchen. 


Their Burger Wellington offering is the Wallburger, and it’s described like this: Smoked and smashed brisket patty with pepper jack cheese, dill pickles, chipotle mayo and curtido cabbage relish in a Brezelmanina potato bun with chilli con queso fries and birria dip. The Garage Project beer match was once again Garagista, so I again had that.

It looks like this: 


That is a substantial burger! The fries were smothered in aioli and chilli, so were more suitable for eating with a fork, but the burger was pick-up-able. Unfortunately the bun wasn’t of the most robust construction, and as I was eating it, it stared to drift apart like a plate tectonic. This wasn’t helped by the burger – I don’t think the brisket had been cooked long enough to get to that fall-apart consistency which is usually the aim, and it was still a bit chewy. The cheese, relish and pickles, however, were good. I feel that this burger was let down in the delivery, and the cooking of the brisket – the elements were all here to make this a great burger. The fries in themselves would probably make a good meal – I couldn’t finish them. I’m scoring it a disappointing 6/10.


Pao Bao

On Friday I had a Zealandia By Day tour booked. We’re coming in to the long weekend for Labour Day in New Zealand, so the Tours Team had opened up some of the ZBD tours to paid guides in order to meet the expected demand. I booked myself in to take the 1000 tours for Friday, Sunday and Monday.

After the tour was over, I drove into town in search of burgers. Mr Go’s is an Asian street-food type place on Taranaki Street, and the food there has always been tasty. I thought I’d give their burger a go (ha-ha, do you see what I did there? 😉 ).


Burger Wellington describe the Pao Bao like this: Kung Pao chicken with Shoots NZ microgreen slaw, pink pickled onion, red pepper and Sichuan mayonnaise in a housemade steamed bao with skin-on shoestring fries. The Garage Project beer match is Noon Juice, one of the new brews specially created for Burger Wellington this year; and one I’ve had before, and found to be thoroughly acceptable, so I opted for it again.

It looks like this:


As you can see, a bit unwieldy. Also, being a bao bun, I find that these can be a bit doughy, so I decided to remove the lid and use cutlery to tackle this burger instead. The Kung Pau chicken was sweet, spicy and tasty, and the fries crisp. As I expected, it was a little bit bready and I didn’t finish the bun. I did finish the fries though, because they were good. Overall, another good burger, and I’m scoring it 8/10.

 

The Forager

I had another training session shadowing a night tour on Thursday, so decided to get a burger on my way to Zealandia. I didn’t really want to stop off in the CBD at the height of rush hour, so I decided to detour through Newtown and try the burger from Mediterarranean Food Trattoria & Deli.

I’ve not been to MFT&D for donkeys years. Last time we went, it was called Mediterranean Food Warehouse, and was largely what it said on the tin, with a small café serving pizza and cabinet food on the side. But times change, and it is now mostly a pizzeria and restaurant with a small sideline in selling Mediterranean foods. I managed to park on Constable Street close by, and went in to sample their burger. It’s called The Forager, and Burger Wellington describes it like this: Black Angus beef patty with truffled prosciutto cotto ham, Taleggio cheese, lollo lettuce, balsamic borettane pickled onion and locally foraged porcini mushrooms in an Altamura sourdough bread bun, with Van der Rose potato wedges.

It looked like this:


It’s a pretty hefty burger, but I managed to squash it together and pick it up. Fortunately there wasn’t too much slippage with all those ingredients listed, and the prosciutto and cheese gave it a sweet saltiness, with an additional tang added by the onions. The mushrooms were a bit lost at the bottom and I couldn’t really detect their flavour much. The wedges weren’t particularly crispy, which was a disappointment, but overall the burger wasn’t bad. The Garage Project beer match was an old favourite, Garagista, but as I was on my way to work I went with Adam’s Ale instead. I’m scoring this burger a 7/10.

The night tour was pretty cool – two kiwi and a ruru! Also a gecko, and a Cook Strait giant wētā. All in all a successful evening.


Thursday, October 22, 2020

The Tongue Twister

We were in town today so decided to try a burger from Olive on Cuba Street. They’re a reliable café-style eatery, with a menu that is usually quite vegetarian-heavy, but they’ve decided to go big on the meat burger this year with The Tongue Twister.


It’s described on the Burger Wellington page like this: Beef patty with tongue bacon, battered pickle, green peppercorn BBQ sauce, smoked cheddar, lettuce and mayonnaise in an Arobake horopito brioche bun, with prawn and soy crackers and seaweed salt. The Garage Project beer match is Pickle beer. This has the misfortune to be a sour beer, a style I’m not keen on, so I picked a Parrotdog Pandemonium instead. Also, as there are no chips with this burger, I ordered some.

It looks like this:


The first thing that happened was the lid and burger slid off the base as the waiter put it on the table. Clearly unstable, I thought, as I reassembled the burger, and proceeded to attack it with knife and fork instead.

The key feature of this burger is the tongue bacon, and there were two generous slices of this topping the patty. Other than that, the other elements of the burger were all present. Personally I’d have left out the lettuce, or at least shredded it to make it a bit more manageable, but that’s just my preference. The bread-to-burger ratio was more to the bread side, and I left half of the top uneaten. The prawn crackers seemed to be a bit of an afterthought, and didn’t really complement the burger in any way, so I’m not sure why they were there. Just serve your burgers with chips, people! (Unless you’re deliberately doing an Asian-style bao burger or something.) The patty itself was flavourful and well cooked, and overall I thought this was a good burger. I scored it an 8/10.

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Gochu

Another day, another burger dictated by timing and accessibility. I was due to do another night tour shadowing at Zealandia as part of my training, so decided to get an early burger in Miramar before heading to Karori. The venue I selected was Gasworks, as they are (a) open in the evening, and (b) on the way. Nicola came with me and walked back home afterwards.


Gasworks’ burger is called Gochu, and is described like this: Beef patty with gochujang sauce, pickles, cheddar, Swiss, jalapeño cheese, Woody's Free Range Farm pastrami, caramelised onions and ketchup in a Brezelmania potato bun, with fried daikon pickles.

It looked like this:


So what did I think of it? Well, there was a nice spiciness about the gochujang sauce, and it was easily manhandled without falling apart. And whilst all the trimmings were there (fried pickles is a theme that seems to be running this year), the central element was a let-down: the patty itself was flavourless. I don’t know what beef they were using, but they need to find something better. Overall, a disappointing effort. I scored it 5/10.


Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Opa!

My best-laid plans have been ganging aglay like nobody’s business recently! Burger opportunities are being thwarted at every turn.

On Saturday, I was shadowing a Zealandia Twilight Tour. It ended later than I anticipated, so my plan to pick up a burger at Kelburn Village Pub was denied, as their kitchen shuts at 9pm, and we didn’t get out until quarter past. Oh, well, no problem, I’ll get one tomorrow…

On Sunday, KIWIZ, the quiz team I have been participating in the World Cup with, were due to play a team from California, Cogito Ergo Mum. Due to time differences and people needing to get to work, the time we agreed was 2:00 am UK time (all timings are run from the UK, as the organisers are UK-based) i.e. 2:00 pm Sunday afternoon for us, and 7:00 pm Saturday for our opposition. So far, so good…but when the notifications came through, however, they all said 1:00 am UK time. “Oh, that’s because they’re changing to Summer Time” someone said – but that doesn’t happen until this weekend. At this point I said I wouldn’t be able to make it, as I had a morning shift at Zealandia.

That’s when the trouble really started. As I was coming off shift, I checked my phone. The time had now been switched back to 2:00 pm, but one of our team members couldn’t make it, so I said I could step in and rushed back home, burgerless. My plan had been to stop in town and pick one up along the way. As it was, I had no time.

I got home, checked in again, and found that they were back up to four people, so didn’t need me after all! So I had no quiz, no burger, and was generally discombobulated. Harrumph!

On Monday night, I was due back at Zealandia for After Hours Valley Emergency training. This started at 6:30 pm, so this time I was finally able to stop at Kelburn Village pub and try their burger. It’s called Opa! and sounds like this: Moroccan-spiced chicken with slaw and Elysian tzatziki in an Arobake beetroot bun, with beer-battered onion rings and polenta fries.

And here’s how it looked: 

Now I’m not normally a big fan of polenta (who is?), but the deep-fried “chips” weren’t bad. The burger was OK, a little on the small side, and the chicken agreeably spicy. Bun integrity was good, and overall the whole meal was…unexceptional. It did the job, and what it said on the tin, but no-one’s going to be writing home about what a great culinary experience they’ve just had. It is, after all, pub grub. As I was going straight on to work I went without the Garage Project beer match, which would have been Noon Juice. Instead, I had cranberry juice. I scored the burger 6/10.

Over the coming week I’ve got more training to do, so my burger choices might be dictated by convenience and speed rather than what looks the best. Hopefully some of them will be good.

 

 

 

Sunday, October 18, 2020

Night Stalker

This summer there’s unlikely to be quite the same demand for guided tours at Zealandia. Last year, we had a bumper crop of cruise ships into Wellington before the covids abruptly cut off that business, and I for one am not expecting it to resume in the 20/21 summer season. Maybe next year? Maybe no go.

Anyway, rather than recruit and train a new batch of guides, they have decided to train up some of the existing day guides to be able to take night tours. This involves an additional layer of training and responsibility – because the visitor centre is closed at night. This means that the night guide is the only person available to deal with any situation that may arise – you can’t just get on the radio to call up Duty Ops or other assistance as you can in the daytime. Also, a first aid certificate is required. 

Why am I telling you this? You’ve guessed it – I’m one of those guides who got the call. Starting on Saturday, I’ll be shadowing a number of different night guides over the coming weeks to pick up their techniques and learn all the procedures for night guiding. At some indeterminate future date I’ll also receive first aid training.

On Saturday evening I turned up at Zealandia, to join the Twilight Tour. It was led by Jac, one of the guides with whom I trained last year for cruise ship duties. She’s been doing twilight and night tours from the outset, and also has some work with the education team. Our night guide assistant was late, so we actually had to do a lot of the set-up that they would normally do, which was helpful as I didn’t know what all that was – checking torches, headsets, arranging the tea etc.

The first part of the tour is pretty much the same as for a Zealandia By Day tour, which I’ve been doing for the last year. The only difference is I have to check people in myself using the Visitor Centre systems, so I’m going to need to learn all about these. Otherwise it’s a welcome, introductions, short history of New Zealand, show the film, and out into the valley. This is where it gets different: for the Twilight Tour – you’ve guessed it! – it’s going to get dark. This is why we supply all visitors with red light torches (the red light doesn’t interfere with most animals’ vision). Also, as we’re looking for some quite shy creatures in the quiet of the night, we use a headset and earpieces so the guide doesn’t have to make their voice carry. But it doesn’t get dark straight away, so we spend some time doing the normal day guide stuff – looking for birds, other animals, plants, and telling the same stories. The hardest part for me was keeping quiet! I’m used to leading tours, not shadowing them, so had to keep shtum whilst Jac did her spiel. Towards the end of the tour as night fell we started looking for kiwi in earnest, and although Jac saw two briefly, I never caught a glimpse. We heard them calling, though, as well as kākā and ruru. We also stopped for a cup of kawakawa tea towards the end of the tour.

At the end of the tour, there’s also more procedures to go through as the Visitor Centre has to be secured, the events of the tour recorded on the system, and possibly take any sales of merchandise from the shop. Also, all the equipment needs to be stowed away after use. Finally, we have to leave the building securely.

That was my first tour shadowing. I’ll be doing a couple more next week, and also have to do After Hours Valley Emergency training, and do a training tour. This will all happen over the next few weeks. Watch this space!


Saturday, October 17, 2020

Double Happy

I took a day off yesterday to eat some health food (salad) as I knew that this weekend would be burgerlicious. Today, Nicola is competing in the New Zealand Barbershop quartet competition with Excess Baggage, and as I was obliged to be in the audience I decided to reward myself with an offering from Grill Meats Beer. Normally they make excellent burgers anyway, so what would they do to excel themselves during Burger Wellington?


If you’ve read the title, you can probably guess…two burgers! Yes, there are two of them, with very different styles, and both slider-sized so not too much for one meal. Here's the description: Slider duo: Wagyu patty with Swiss and housemade pickle salt crisps in a Brezelmania Pretzel Bun; Korean fried chicken with Fix & Fogg satay, iceberg and kimchi in a steamed bao bun. I also chose the Garage Project beer match, Noon Juice – a cloudy IPA. It was a good beer.

The burgers looked like this:


I tackled the bao bun first. It was a bit messy so I opted for cutlery. But tasty! Yeah! Very spicy, sweet, and sticky. The wagyu slider was also very good – this one I could pick up, so I did. There was a saltiness to it, presumably from the salt crisps, which added an extra layer. No chips with this one, and I forgot to order any, but probably just as well because…well, you’ll see.

Overall, a pretty good lunch experience, and I rate this 7/10.


Thursday, October 15, 2020

The Hunter

Today’s burger was the first that I’ve tried whose choice wasn’t dictated by proximity or time pressure. I took a look through all the burgers listed as “Wellington Suburbs” on the Location drop-down on the Burger Wellington page, to see what was going on in the Eastern suburbs generally. There’s a lot! From this shortlist I selected Arcimboldi in Seatoun, who are offering a venison burger. It’s called The Hunter, and it sounds like this: Awatoru Wildfood venison patty with millionaire's bacon, fried onions, rocket and Dijon Zany Zeus crème fraîche in a Zaida's sesame bun, with housecut fries. Sounds good, huh?

The Garage Project beer match is Cereal Milk Stout. Made with cornflakes, apparently. It comes with instructions: shake the can by inverting it three times, open and pour vigorously into a glass. It does not have a widget inside the can, of the kind found in Guinness (and other) cans in the UK. Instead, it is injected with liquid nitrogen, and it is this that gives the classic head beloved of stout and porter drinkers:

The burger itself looked like this:


This is a burger that could easily be picked up by hand, and I proceeded to do so. The first bite produced the inevitable squirt of juices from the opposite end of the burger, so it was a bit messy to eat. But bun integrity was good, and the burger wasn’t dried out as can happen with venison  - I suspect the addition of some pork fat into the patty to prevent this - and well flavoured with rosemary. I wish my hand-cut chips came out as well as theirs did…but for that I’d probably need to buy a deep-fat fryer. Which I’m not going to do. The barbecue sauce for the chips was tangy and full-flavoured. This was a pretty delicious burger. Even better than yesterday’s?...Yes. So I give it 9/10 (gotta leave myself some wiggle room for something truly spectacular!)

I’m going to have to plan my next burger adventures around work, as I’m going to be spending quite some time at Zealandia over the following week. I’m going to investigate further afield than Eastern suburbs so that I can feed myself on the way to and from Karori.


Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Umami Monster

It’s Day Three in the Big Burger House, and once again I decided to go local for today’s offering. This was due to time constraints around use of the car – Nicola has a thing at 2:00pm in town, so I needed to get back in time to hand over the key. I chose our local, and still fairly new, burger joint: Gorilla Burger. We’ve been there a few times and found their offerings pretty good.


The Umami Monster is described as such: Smoked point end brisket with Beehive bacon bits, Fortune Favours Necromancer black beer cheese sauce, dill pickles and pink onions in a Brezelmania milk bun. There’s no Garage Project beer match as Gorilla Burger are pretty much joined at the hip to Fortune Favours Brewery, so I selected a Trailblazer as accompaniment. They’re also offering $1 fries at the moment, so I took those as well.

It looked like this: 


Gorilla Burger’s offerings are designed for picking up, none of your namby-pamby “eating burger with knife and fork” nonsense here. As you can see, however, this one’s going to be messy. Nevertheless, it held together until the end; the bun, though light and airy, did not sacrifice integrity. This is just as well as a heavy bun can make the whole experience hard work…they’ve hit just the right balance of consistency and structure.

The burger itself was tasty, full of umami as advertised. The burger contained both a patty and strips of brisket, with plenty of sauce, and pink onions. Bacon bits as described. The brisket was slow-cooked to be fall-apart tender, and hadn’t been over-smoked, as some brisket burgers are; which sometimes overpowers the actual beef flavour of the burger. The bun was topped off with a deep-fried pickle, which seems to be the thing these days. The fries were their standard-issue fries served with aioli.

“This IS a tasty burger!” I said to myself, and polished it off in short order. The first beef burger I’ve had (OK, only three days in), and easily the pick of the bunch so far. I score it 8/10.


G & T Burger

The more quick-witted amongst my readership may have noticed that Burger Wellington is this year taking place in October, rather than the customary August. This is, of course, due to the covids. The original aim of WOAP was to encourage people into restaurants and other venues during the cold, dark days of winter (i.e. August), helping venues to survive through the lean months. Naturally, when the plague struck, the festival was put on hold, but with remarkable alacrity they managed to reorganise for October.

 

Tuesday night is our regular quiz night at The Old Bailey, so I decided to try their burger offering, the G & T Burger. It’s described like this: Reid + Reid gin infused lamb and venison patty with crispy bacon and jalapeño cheese spread in a Zaida's spirulina brioche bun, with cross trax fries. It looks like this:

 


The Garage Project beer match was Hāpi Daze - an old classic that I was happy to wash the burger down with.

The Old Bailey is not known for its cuisine – they serve fairly standard pub grub most of the time. This was actually better than their normal burger, which is fairly run of the mill. I couldn’t detect any gin in the burger, but this may have been due to the fact that the flavours of the burger were pretty well dominated by the jalapeño. As they say on Cheftermast, make sure your dish is in balance. In this case it wasn’t, so I was just left with the overwhelming chilli. The cross trax fries were a sort of potato waffle. They weren’t salted enough (and there’s no salt & pepper on tables these days, because, you know, covids) and they may have been better off just doing chips. So overall not a great burger. I’m scoring it 5/10. As mentioned previously, there's nowhere to actually record our scores this year, for reasons.

Anyway, I know that what you really want to know is how we did in the quiz. We came 3rd.

Monday, October 12, 2020

The Womble Of Wellington

And they’re off! Yes, Burger Wellington – part of Wellington On A Plate – starts today, and I had my first burger of the competition.


Nicola was due in Lower Hutt at 1pm for a quartet rehearsal, so we set out for an early lunch at Scorch-O-Rama, our local seaside café. Their offering is called The Womble Of Wellington, and is described as such: Buttermilk fried chicken with bacon, avocado, pickles, smoked cheese, lettuce, chutney and chorizo aioli in a Brezelmania charcoal bun. The Garage Project beer match is Hophaus Alt, about which no information is forthcoming, so far as I can see, either from Garage Project or WOAP. Anyway, it’s a hoppy pale ale. The burger looks like this:

 


That bit pinned to its lid is a battered deep-fried pickle. It’s immediately obvious that this is not a burger for picking up and eating with your hands, so I cut into it to see what was on the inside:

 


There’s quite a lot going on here, as you can tell from the description. Maybe too much? Well, it seemed to work OK, but the chicken was a little bit lost amongst all the other ingredients. You’ll have noticed there’s an absence of chips with this burger. I ordered some but the waiter misheard as we’d been having a discussion about whether we needed them or not…but he managed to bring me some poste-haste, so that was OK. For what is a burger without fries? Can a burger be said to exist without a side of fries? This and other questions will be answered in the next episode of Soap

Overall, not a bad burger. I’ll score it a 7/10 and enter that score on the WOAP website…wait, what? There’s nowhere to score the burgers this year? How will they know who’s won?

  

Feast Your Eyes – Inconceivable!

Feast Your Eyes is a regular feature run by the Roxy cinema in Wellington. We’ve been to a couple of similar events before – Sweet Bean and Hunt For The Wilderpeople. Like many of their now-regular programmes, it started as a WOAP event, but is now run throughout the year. The idea is to take a classic film and create a dish and a cocktail to accompany it. It’s not as full-on as the Eat The Film events that they also run – most recently, with Flash Gordon as the film.

This time around it was The Princess Bride. This is a film now considered a cult classic, but at the time of its release it wasn’t particularly successful. Most people have never seen it on the big screen (including me) so this was an opportunity to watch it in all its glory, and also to quote all the most recognisable lines.


We turned up early, and after a short wait queued to get our cocktail – the Dread Pirate Roberts’ rum & coke, made with both light and dark rums, lime, cola, and gunpowder. I’m not much of a cola drinker, but managed to force it down without too much difficulty. The food offering was a dessert – A Dweam Wivvin A Dweam. It was a Whittaker’s chocolate mousse mixed with hazelnut cream, meringue and strawberries – a kind of Eton mess with added chocolate, if you like.

Note the cocktail is wearing a black mask


And so to the film: I assume you’ve seen it, and know all the key points – “as you wish”; shrieking eels;  “inconceivable!”; “nobody can survive the fire swamp!” “You only say that because no-one ever has!”; rodents of unusual size; and of course “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” It was a rollicking good laugh, and we all called out the lines at the right moments.

Friday, October 2, 2020

Sweet Mid-Week Escape

And they’re off! Yes, once again, Wellington On A Plate season is upon us – delayed by a couple of months this year due to the covids. The format is as it was last year, with two weeks of WOAP menus in the first half of the month and two weeks of burgers in the second half. There are also special events running throughout, and it was to one of these that we went at lunchtime.


Carello Del Gelato have been providing gelato to Wellington’s Oriental Parade for a number of years, and we went along to a demonstration of gelato making. The ticket said “go to Coromandel St, Newtown” which was a bit odd, but I figured that’s where the manufactory process took place. Well, that used to be true, and there’s even still half of a sign there, but they abandoned that some time ago for better premises elsewhere. Then my phone rang. “Hi, this is Kat from Carello Del Gelato, it looks like the ticketing people have sent you to the wrong place!” Yes, they’d only just discovered this error so were busy phoning everyone to get them to come to the right place, i.e. their shop on Wellington’s waterfront. We hopped back in the car and through some deft manoeuvring through Newtown, made it to Oriental Parade a mere 15 minutes late. They hadn’t started the demo as they were still waiting for one other group to arrive.

Phew! What a palaver! Anyway, we were now ready to go through the gelato-making process with Nathan, the proprietor. First up, we made chocolate gelato, with milk, cream (mostly milk though), Dutch cocoa, chocolate chips, sugar and dextrose. The milk and cream were heated, and mixed with the other ingredients before being poured into the churner, which cools the mix to -8°C whilst aerating it so it doesn’t set into a solid block. We tasted the mixture beforehand, and found it to be quite sweet and chocolatey. Nathan assured us it would taste less so once frozen as you can’t taste so much when it’s cold. He invited us to name our individual pots so we could identify them later to take home, and stuck labels on our pots. I called mine Chocky McChockface, obviously.

Mixing the mixture
The complex process of pouring

Churning in action


Once it had churned to Nathan’s satisfaction (holding its shape and not having a shiny appearance) we tried the fresh gelato before consigning it to pots in the freezer.

Next up was strawberry sorbet. Made with frozen fresh strawberries which had been defrosted, and again, sugar and dextrose, a bit of fibre to give it some body, and a couple of other ingredients (maltodextrin was one) for technical reasons – stabiliser or some such. Again, this was poured into the churner – which works a lot faster than my freezer-cooled home ice cream maker, largely because it’s running an industrial refrigeration unit which needs to be water-cooled to stop it from overheating.

Once it had reached the correct consistency, we tried it, and again potted some (my batch was called Storbreez). We then had a bit of a chat about making and other flavours, giving the sorbet a little time to set in the freezer. The end product is much creamier than you might expect – people say it’s nothing like a sorbet that they’ve had before. Nathan contends that what they’ve had before is inferior, icy products that aren’t a true sorbet like he produces.

 

Strawberry  sorbet churning

Nathan pours a batch

At the end of the demo we had a quick look in the shop to see what other flavours they’re currently producing. As well as “normal” flavours (fruit, chocolate etc.) they have a charcoal sorbet (activated charcoal, coconut water), and a new flavour of cucumber, mint and lime, which I sampled. My previous attempts at cucumber sorbet have not been a resounding success so I’ll try again, and maybe add some dextrose instead of sugar, and lime juice to try to de-sweeten it. We finally grabbed our tubs (two each) and drove home to get them in the freezer. Looks like we’ll be having gelato and sorbet for pudding for the foreseeable future.