I generally don't get dessert when I go out to restaurants—I'll take a neat amaro over a fancypants foam-and-quenelle number any day. But if there's an ice cream, gelato, sorbet, or semifreddo on the menu, I'm 100% ordering it. (And if it's the lavender frozen yogurt at Olmsted in Brooklyn, I'm ordering two.)
However, I absolutely refuse to make any of the aforementioned frozen desserts at home. I will never be the kind of person who owns, much less uses, an ice cream maker. I've convinced myself ice cream and its cousins are too "difficult" or "fussy" to recreate at home. But senior food editor Andy Baraghani's Peach Lassi Sorbet with Crushed Blackberries—which calls for seven ingredients and zero ice cream machines—was out to prove me very, very wrong.
This recipe is the definition of low-effort, high-reward (it's also not technically a sorbet since it has dairy in it, but who cares!) It's 80% frozen peaches, bolstered by a few dollops of Greek yogurt, a splash of vodka, honey, and salt. That's it! It's basically a smoothie! Dump everything into a food processor or blender and blitz-blitz-blitz, scraping down the sides every so often with a spatula for maximum smoooooth, until you end up with a luscious Creamsicle-colored mixture that "someone" might actually end up eating a quarter of as they scoop the mixture into a loaf pan. Pop the pan in the freezer and a few hours later, voil`à—dessert! When I asked Andy about how everything gets so creamy without churning, he told me it's all about that smidge of vodka (don't worry, you can't taste it at all), which prevents the sorbet from getting too icy and makes it easier to scoop.
Because Andy always feels the need to make things a little extra, there are also crushed blackberries spooned on top, which you could omit but they're so good, you won't want to. The berries first hang out with a bit of lemon juice and honey until they get juicy and syrupy, and all those punchy tart flavors cut through the rich yogurt and sweet honey in the sorbet. I'm sure this would have been even more amazing had I had the foresight to ripen, slice, and freeze my own perfect farmers' market peaches instead of using the bagged frozen kind, but hey, we can't all be Andy.
I recently made scallop aguachile and shrimp-pineapple tacos for a dinner party, but it was this sorbet that my friends couldn't stop raving about. I served it in little bowls with the berries spooned on top. But by the end of the night we found ourselves pulling the loaf pan back out of the freezer and diving into the remains, scrounging with our spoons for every last bite, the best dinner-party move of all.
