The Tour de France is going on this month, and as usual in the past year or two, tons of the teams’ chefs are on twitter, facebook, and various blogs. Seeing what the riders are having for dinner is always fun for me, and I was quite excited to find out that the chef for ORICA GreenEDGE (their capitalization, not mine!) was sharing a recipe a day on facebook. This is one of his desserts.

I really liked this, and I think you could serve it at anything from a cookout to a fairly fancy dinner. Certain factions in the house don’t believe that fruit-based items can be dessert, and are giant babies about eating peaches, but still admitted that the sorbet is excellent.

The recipe as written was kind of brief and doesn’t have a lot of guidance, so I’ll be writing it up as it worked for me. Because it’s from a non-US source, this recipe’s in metric measurements and requires a scale. It really is kind of worth having a scale around for more accurate measurements, and you can get pretty cheap ones on Amazon.

Ingredients:

Caramelized Peaches:

• 4 peaches
• 100 grams sugar
• 1 vanilla pod (I used a small amount of vanilla paste)

Strawberry Sorbet:

• 200g frozen strawberries
• 1/2 liter water
• 200 grams sugar
• 2 grams gelatin
• 1 lemon

To prepare the peaches, rinse and dry them, then cut into medium sized chunks, removing the pits.

Place the sugar in a pan, shaking the pan to spread the sugar fairly evenly. Place over medium low heat and cook until caramelized, shaking the pan occasionally to keep any one part from over-cooking. Keep a close eye on this, as sugar quickly goes from not-quite-ready to grossly burnt. Adding the peaches a few seconds early is greatly preferable to adding them to over-cooked sugar.

Nearly all melted, a few seconds more and you want to get your peaches in there!

Add the peaches and seeds from the vanilla bean, and stir to coat. Reduce heat to low and let cook several minutes, stirring frequently. I found the peaches released quite a bit of liquid.

Remove from heat and let rest 1 hour.

To make the sorbet, combine the strawberries, water, and sugar in a pot. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce to medium heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the berries are very soft and most of their color has been leached out into the water. I was surprised how red the water got, and how grey-white the berries became.

These strawberries still have a bunch of color left to give!

Pour the mixture through a strainer into a bowl, squeezing the liquid out of the strawberries before discarding them. Add the gelatin powder into the still-hot liquid, and stir well for several minutes to ensure it dissolves. Add enough juice from the lemon, several drops at a time, that the mixture tastes bright and fresh. Set aside to cool to room temperature.

So red, so fruity!

Freeze the liquid in your ice cream maker until firm.

Serve on top of the caramelized peaches, and drizzle with some of the excess liquid in the peaches, if desired.

I had to leave the cooked peaches sitting around for way longer than recommended, they were probably more vibrant looking earlier in the day… Still fantastic!

Like I said, I thought this was great, and it’s gotta be way healthier than a lot of the stuff I normally eat for dessert!

Caramelized Peaches

From OGE’s Taste of the Tour facebook album.

Caramelized Peaches:

• 4 peaches
• 100 grams sugar
• 1 vanilla pod

Strawberry Sorbet:

• 200g frozen strawberries
• 1/2 liter water
• 200 grams sugar
• 2 grams gelatin
• 1 lemon

To prepare the peaches, rinse and dry them, then cut into medium sized chunks, removing the pits.

Place the sugar in a pan, shaking the pan to spread the sugar fairly evenly. Place over medium low heat and cook until caramelized, shaking the pan occasionally to keep any one part from over-cooking.

Add the peaches and seeds from the vanilla bean, and stir to coat. Reduce heat to low and let cook several minutes, stirring frequently. Remove from heat and let rest 1 hour.

To make the sorbet, combine the strawberries, water, and sugar in a pot. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce to medium heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the berries are very soft and most of their color has been leached out into the water.

Pour the mixture through a strainer into a bowl, squeezing the liquid out of the strawberries before discarding them. Add the gelatin powder into the still-hot liquid, and stir well for several minutes to ensure it dissolves. Add enough juice from the lemon, several drops at a time, that the mixture tastes bright and fresh. Set aside to cool to room temperature. Freeze the liquid in your ice cream maker until firm.

Serve sorbet on top of the caramelized peaches, and drizzle with some of the excess liquid in the peaches, if desired.