verveine sorbet recipe

This is a delicious, sparkly-fresh sorbet, ideal for supper after a hot day. To give it a real punch, you need to use a lot of lemon verbena.

Serves 4

• 185g caster sugar
• About 80 lemon verbena leaves
• 250ml dry white wine
• Juice of 2 lemons

Make a syrup by dissolving the caster sugar in 500ml water and then boiling hard for 7 minutes.

Wash and dry the lemon verbena leaves. Put them in a saucepan with the syrup and 250ml water, and bring gently to the boil.

As soon as the mixture reaches boiling point, draw the saucepan off the heat, pour the mixture into a bowl and add the wine and lemon juice.

Cover and, when cool, put it in the fridge to steep overnight.

The next day, stain the liquid, put it into an ice cream maker and freeze/churn for 20 minutes, or until it is the right consistency to scrape into containers for the freezer. If you don't have an ice cream maker, put it into a plastic container and freeze, breaking up the ice particles a couple of times with a fork at 2 hour intervals.

This sorbet needs at least 3 hours in the freezer before you use it.

Take the sorbet out of the freezer and put in the fridge for half an hour before serving.

This recipe features on p225 of Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook