Fresh low calorie cilantro watermelon sorbet made without an ice cream maker and serves as a frosty summertime dessert with the sophisticated flavoring of cilantro.
Cilantro Watermelon Sorbet
Traditional ice cream or sorbet requires an ice cream churn, sometimes cream or milk, and always a granulated sugar to make the texture right.
Healthifying this recipe means making a vegan sorbet, thus throwing out the dairy and sugar, and depending on plant-based ingredients only.
The bulk of this watermelon sorbet comes from watermelon and raspberries, with the watermelon supplying the sweetness. Using lime further accentuates the natural sweetness that the watermelon supplies. And the cilantro adds a sophisticate green bite.
The resulting product is perfect as an excellent brunch opener, as a palate cleanser between flavors at dinner parties, or just a fresh delicious low calorie vegan dessert!
How to Make Watermelon Sorbet
It’s really easy, but starts with freezing your watermelon. Since you need a lot of watermelon, that might be inconvenient so I suggest freezing as much as you can, and just chilling the rest in the frig before you make this.
Once you have it frozen, it’s just a matter of blending up ingredients, pouring into a parchment lined loaf pan, freezing, blending, and freezing again.
Oh and for this recipe, I actually suggest mulling the cilantro and straining if you don’t want specs in your sorbet.
Is Frozen Watermelon Good?
Actually there are benefits to freezing watermelon beyond being able to make sorbet. If your watermelon seems over-ripe and not great to serve sliced, chop it up or put it into ice cube trays and freeze for other recipes like this watermelon sorbet but also for watermelon smoothies or even watermelon water.
What Can You Do With A Bad Watermelon?
Make watermelon sorbet! Or watermelon slush, or watermelon popsicles or any watermelon recipe that involves freezing or blending watermelon.
How Healthy is Cilantro?
So lots of herbs are wonderful with Green leafy cilantro – found fresh along side parsley in the produce area – is one of the world’s oldest herbs. It’s a staple in Latin American cuisine. I like its extraordinary health benefits. I always toss handfuls into my smoothies.
Specifically cilantro has the ability to increase insulin production, lower bad cholesterol levels (LDL), and lowers blood sugar.
I also love that it is great for sleep support and mood swings caused by hormone fluctuations because it is rich in magnesium and iron.
Its cleansing ability is very unusual and useful. It has chemical compounds, apparently, that bind to toxic metals in body tissue. And it has anti-bacterial properties, and is able to basically sanitize your insides.
Convinced you should be eating cilantro? How about consider it in this recipe, with the lovely contrast green cilantro brings to a sweet watermelon base.
How Healthy is Watermelon?
And speaking of watermelon. Isn’t just a sweet sugary melon with no nutritional value?
It had that reputation for a while, but now science shows that watermelon is one of the most nutritious fruits on the planet.
How Healthy is Watermelon?
It is true it is mostly water (92%). That makes it a wonderful hydration source.
But it is so much more.
It is so very high in anti-oxidants, those compounds that stop disease in its tracks. And it is unusually high in Lycopene, a phytonutrient that triggers healthy reactions in the human body. You can tell when a fruit has high levels of lycopene because they are red, as in tomatoes and red grapefruits. Read more about the nutrition of watermelon here.
So we’ve established that this sorbet is made of some pretty healthy ingredients.
But what about the process? Isn’t making no-churn ice cream a rather arduous technique?
You could just eat it all slushy out of the blender, but that’s not a sorbet. That’s slushy out of the blender.
So to no-churn it, you need to freeze and chop it, freeze and chop it, over several hours.
If that’s a deal-breaker, no problem. Buy an ice cream maker. To be honest, for a long time I was of a staunch “No Churner”.
Do I Need an Ice Cream Maker?
I make a lot of no churn recipes, but sometimes it’s fun to get the creamier texture you get from an ice cream maker. Just look on Amazon for an inexpensive one, you don’t need any bells and whistles. I usually have an inexpensive one posted on my Amazon store here.
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Cilantro Watermelon Sorbet
Ingredients
- 8 cups watermelon Best to freeze some of it in ice cube trays to increase frostiness of ice cream.
- 3 cups frozen raspberries
- 1 banana frozen, or use 1/4 cup of coconut milk from a can, at room temperture.
- 3 tbsp baobab powder
- 1/4 cup chopped cilantro
- 1/2 cup key lime juice
Instructions
Prep
- Chop the cilantro into little pieces or use a mortar and pestal to make a paste. Juice the limes and muddle the cilantro in the lime juice. Refrigerate the mixture overnight.
- The next morning, strain off the cilantro bits unless you don't mind green flecks in your ice cream.
- Day of making ice cream, chill the blender jar in the freezer for 30 minutes.
- Line a 4-inch x 8-inch loaf pan with parchment paper.
Make the Ice Cream
- Add all ingredients into the chilled blender jar, and process until smooth.
- Pour into the loaf pan, and press a sheet of parchment on top of the mixture.
- Freeze for 1 hour.
- Remove the parchment, and chop up the mixture. It's probably slushy.
- Restore the parchment on the surface and freeze another hour.
- I repeated this process 2 times over 2 hours. If I were making a creamy ice cream, I would do it three times more. However, I wanted an icy texture here to mimic sorbet. And this recipe would never get very creamy because there is no fat base. TIP: To turn this recipe into a creamy texture, add 1/2 cup of full fat coconut milk, or 1/2 cup of avocados.
- After the last chop, I blended it again in a blender jar (not chilled this time), and poured it back in the loaf pan, and froze one more hour or more.
- Then we scooped it into dishes and served with fresh berries.
- You might have to let the loaf pan sit on the counter for 20 minutes or so to thaw before scooping.
- Sprinkle with frozen raspberries, and lime zest! Such a unique, sophisticated flavor.
Nutrition
Dee Dine is founder of Green Smoothie Gourmet, a plant based recipe blog, and author of the recent cookbook, Crazy Healthy with 4 Ingredients . On this blog you’ll find incredibly easy recipes with hidden veggies for anyone wanting to eat healthier, regardless of diet. Dee has graduate degrees in sciences and journalism. More about Dee Dine here.
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