Strawberry season calls for sorbet

It’s strawberry time again. The markets are bursting with them. Pick-your-own farms are open for business, too, so the time is ripe to fill a flat for freezing or making jam.

Then there’s dessert tonight or this weekend: Tarts, pound cake with fresh berries and juice, berries by themselves or with a little cream are luscious. But since we’ve had a stretch of hot and humid days, my daughter and I decided to make Fresh Strawberry Sorbet to see if, well, it really is that much better. It is.

Who isn’t a fan of homemade icy confections, even if just on the Fourth of July or during a beach week? We have so many authentic hand-churned and small dairy versions available locally around the Piedmont, we don’t really have to make it to get the real thing. But at $3-$5 a cone multiplied by a car full of kids and their friends or visiting out of towners, we may want to. Plus, it’s downright fun. We used a small electric sorbet/ ice cream maker with a freezer bowl instead of the ice packed with salt method, or even more traditional, a hand-churned machine. These old-fashioned methods are a wonderful way to slow down and create together, and they yield more finished product than my freezer bowl can.

You do need an ice cream machine for this super quick and simple recipe, but if you don’t have one, you can freeze this mixture in a shallow glass baking dish by covering with foil and scraping and stirring it every 30 minutes to get a slushy confection writer Mark Bittman calls granitas and Joy of Cooking calls glacés or ices.