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I made this clementine cake a while back, and very much appreciated the fact that it uses the entire fruit. I found a good deal on clementines today, and was thinking of trying to do something similar with ice cream or sherbet or even sorbet!

I'm fairly confident with sorbets - some sugar, water until it's the right consistency, and you're just about done. I'm not so sure about an ice cream, though; I know acid and milk can cause problems, and the high water content of boiled pureed clementines sounds like it could turn creamy to icy.

I don't want to directly ask for a recipe or anything - not that I expect there to be any use-the-whole-orange recipes out there anyway - but I would love some advice about starting points. What kind of recipe would you use as a base for a clementine ice cream or sherbet, using the whole fruit? Or am I over-worrying, and I can just swap orange juice/zest for clementines in an orange sherbet recipe, or add clementines to a plain ice cream base, and get away with it with minimal modification?

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    Aside: many marmalade recipes use the whole fruit. If you are willing to stand over the pot and add the sugar slowly so that you only use as much as it takes to start gelling you get a more intense citrus flavor.
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Jul 16, 2011 at 15:46
  • That would probably be how I would treat the clementine if i were going to add it to an ice cream as well.
    – jeffwllms
    Jul 16, 2011 at 16:32
  • @dmckee: That's actually possibly helpful - I've found a couple recipes using marmalade as an ingredient.
    – Cascabel ♦
    Jul 16, 2011 at 18:12

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I would probably go the sherbet route. I think it would be more forgiving for you with the juice. You don't really see that much citrus ice cream. I think the juice coming from it would just be icy as you said.

Also, you could probably use the zest just fine, but I don't think the rest of the peel will work well.

I would start off by looking at an orange sherbet recipe and go from there.

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  • I don't really buy your assertion that the rest of the peel won't work. It works just fine in that cake, and a big part of the reason for my question is getting all that zest flavor without having to zest a ton of clementines.
    – Cascabel ♦
    Jul 16, 2011 at 14:50
  • Not a problem. If you want to use the whole peel go for it. If it works that's awesome. I wasn't trying to tell you that you can't use it. Just that I wasn't sure how well it would work out.
    – jeffwllms
    Jul 16, 2011 at 15:23
  • Also, people have been doing things like orange creamsicles for a long time, so I imagine there's some way to do an ice cream, even if it's actually swirled ice cream and orange-something.
    – Cascabel ♦
    Jul 16, 2011 at 15:23
  • I wasn't try to employ you couldn't do an IDE cream, just that a sherbet might be an easier start.
    – jeffwllms
    Jul 16, 2011 at 16:17
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    I can attest what @Taste-Five said on both counts. point one The white part of citrus (pith) can have a bitter flavor of varying degrees, even in oranges. Heating pith in a liquid, even mild tasting pith, will make that bitter flavor come out. point two Acids as strong as citrus can sometimes have a curdling effect on milk. You can still mix citrus and milk, but there's a lot more room to go wrong than just making a plain sorbet. With that said, if you're open to lots of trial and error with discarded ingredients, feel free to experiment. Please share anything interesting :D
    – Eric Hu
    Jul 28, 2011 at 8:58
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I did end up making a sherbet, but I did use the entire peels, as used in the clementine cake. With a decent amount of sugar, some dairy, and some lemon juice, it made a very nice bitter orange sherbet. I didn't really use a recipe; I just added milk and cream until it seemed the right consistency, sugar until it seemed sweet enough, and lemon juice until it was slightly tart. (I did consider starting with a recipe, but I realized that the paste made from the whole clementines was so much of the volume that all the quantities would be too far off to be of much use.)

As long as you aren't averse to some bitter flavor, there's nothing wrong with using the entire peels. They're not like normal orange peels - they're much thinner, so there's a lot less of the white part. All of my non-picky friends who tried it loved it. I wouldn't do it with a more bitter-peeled orange variety, though.

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