There’s a Lilly Pilly tree in the rectory yard. This year it fruited twice, and from the second smaller crop I decided to make sorbet.

Warren on TikTok came up with a great way to take the seeds out of the fruit, and I’ve adapted that for this sorbet recipe.

Ingredients

  • Lilly Pilly fruit (this recipe will scale to however much you have; I had around 500g)
  • sugar
  • juice of half a lemon
  1. Give the fruit a rinse and remove stems. Drop it into a pot with about a cup of water, and simmer for a couple of minutes, stirring, until the fruit is blanched - it will lose most of its red colour.
  2. Remove from the heat and leave to cool until the mixture can be safely handled.
  3. Gently squeeze the fruit to remove seeds and discard them. Keep the pulp in the saucepan along with the liquid. Then sieve the deseeded pulp and liquid into a saucepan. Reserve the pulp.
  4. Measure the volume of the liquid and add an equal volume of sugar.
  5. Bring to a simmer and stir until the sugar dissolves forming a syrup.
  6. Add pulp, lilly pilly syrup, and lemon juice to a blender and run until smooth.
  7. Pour the mixture into a metal container and freeze. Every 30 minutes, stir with a fork to break up any ice crystals.
  8. After a couple of hours, it should be ready to serve.

I must say it is absolutely delicious. It has a rich, deep flavour, almost like a more complex cherry sorbet. The colour really surprised me, a visceral pink!