Strawberry tea sorbet

It's hot and humid in Michigan right now, so I decided to make up some more frozen treats. I've been wanting to make a tea based sorbet, so this was my first attempt.

On a side note, when I was a little kid (and apparently too young to be left unsupervised) I would go with my father to the health club when he would work out. I would usually spend the time unattended (instead of being at home unattended, myself and the other unattended children would play with the wooden swords and rubber knives that were left out in the karate/self defense room). Afterward, I would often get a strawberry FrozFruit bar from the juice bar (it had chunks of strawberries in it...it was great). A few years ago I bought myself a box of them and was really disappointed; they just didn't taste the way I remembered. While I was out in LA with Nicole, she bought me a box of the 365 brand strawberry fruit bars...they taste the way I remember the FrozFruit bars tasted as a kid. I would recommend getting a box from Whole Foods.

Onto the recipe...

Ingredients:

• 3 cups of water
• 1/4 -1/2 cup of sugar
• 2 pints of strawberries (it was the bigger plastic container, not the small sort of mesh one...I think this is 2 pints)
• 2 tea bags (I used Orange Pekoe, because that's what I had on hand, green tea would probably be good too)
• 2 tablespoons of lemon or lime juice

I heated the water to a boil and added the sugar. I sort of forgot about it, so it probably reduced by about half a cup. Once the sugar was dissolved, I turned off the heat and let the two tea bags steep for about 3-5 minutes...if you were using green tea, you'd probably go more like 1-3 minutes. I let the mixture cool before taking care of the strawberries.

I pureed the strawberries in my food processor. I processed about 1 pint really smooth and made the other pint a little chunkier, because I found this to be a pleasing texture and flavor in the previous batches. To the strawberries I added the lemon juice, then combined this with the sugary tea.

Last step is to throw it into the ice cream maker! The strawberry flavor is more prominent in the strawberry orange or strawberry tangerine I've made in the past. It almost tastes like the frozen fruit bar, but with a nice, subtle flavor from the tea. I think green tea would be a better choice next time, since the black tea tends to have a little bit of a bitter flavor in the finish. I was going to substitute a little honey for some of the sugar, but I forgot....