Description
The next in my series of fruit sorbet calculators. This one is noticeably simpler, relative to the Strawberry Sorbet. For raspberries, I don't find it necessary to have any form of actual juice, versus a purée. In fact the body of the raspberry purée is an excellent foundation for the texture of the dessert. The only challenge is removing the seeds from this fruit. In this instance I don't actually recommend puréeing using a blender or food processor. Instead, the raspberry should be very thoroughly crushed. Followed by pressing through some sort of mesh or filter. You don't want an appliance based around blades, because it has the potential to start grinding the seeds as well. Which would just make the mixture harder to filter.
The best solution I found was crushing the raspberries in a stand mixer with the paddle, on the lowest speed. Followed by pressing through a standard fine mesh sieve. Even better results were obtained using a food mill, which is normally used for processing tomatoes. There should be many different options you can try for crushing the fruit. The critical point when straining, is to avoid extra fine mesh, or anything similar to cheesecloth/super bags. Again filtration that is too fine will remove important texture from the final fruit purée. It also decreases your yields, in what is already a product intensive process. Even with ideal equipment, I recommend taking the total sorbet batch size you are intending, double that weight, and start with that quantity of raspberries.
After processing, you ideally take your seedless raspberry goo and measure the Brix using a refractometer. Now before inputting this reading into the calculator, I do also recommend making a quick judgment call. Taste the purée and get a sense of if it is particularly sour are not. Whatever the number on your refractometer is, you can reduce it by anywhere between 0.5-1.2, because some of what the refractometer is detecting is also dissolved acids, not only dissolved sugar. The sharper and more acidic your particular batch of raspberries, the more you want to reduce the refractometer reading, before using it as your Sugar Value in the calculator.
One last note, the other reason this calculator is simpler relative to the Strawberry Sorbet, is that there is no potential for an alcohol component. Instead if you require a lower serving temperature, and therefore higher Anti-Freezing Power, the recipe rebalances to use more dextrose and fructose.