Refreshing Lime-Basil Granita

Basically I hate wasting food, so after seeing that my basil plant was getting big, and finding a bag of limes leftover from a get together in my fridge, my mind went straight to making a granita. Granita is an Italian dessert, that is kind of between a slushie and a sorbet. It’s not that hard to make either, but I bet if you bring out granita for your guests, they will think that it’s fancy schmancy.

Ingredients

6 limes, juice squeezed out and zested

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup water

Basil-leaves pulled off the stem (2 big handfuls, I would do double that if you love basil. With the 2 handfuls I used, you couldn’t taste it much at all).

Now What?

Make a simple syrup by boiled the sugar and water together. In a blender put a few spoonfuls of the simple syrup in with the basil. Then pour that mixture into the rest of the rest of the simple syrup, pour in the lime juice and let it seep for an hour. Taste it. It’s going to be really sweet, so keep adding in water until you get it to where you want it to be.

Pour it into a container that has a good amount of surface area. So something like the container I used and not a bowl, and pop it into the freezer. After 30 minutes or an hour, take it out of the freezer and scrape up the ice into whatever liquid is left. You can keep doing this every hour, but I couldn’t, as I made this before bed, so what I did was, when I woke up, I took a spoon and kept scraping the ice, so it starting turning into a granita/sorbet. It won’t be solid ice, so you can scrape it easily. This should serve about 4 people.

-Joyce Huang