You’ve *probably* heard me speak of my fruit hoarding tendencies before. I just can’t help it – when summer’s stone fruits, figs, cherries, and berries come into season, I find myself worried that I won’t have the opportunity to enjoy enough of them, and so I make trips to the market each weekend to buy 5, 10, 15# of fruit for our house alone. That’s two people for those counting. Some of these special beauties end up as gifts for friends we see through the week. We snack on them in the middle of sweltering summer mornings, slice them up for dessert sometimes at night. But most of the time, I have to think of what to do with all this fruit. This summer, when the first bounty of apricots arrived, I conceived of this sorbet, and we’ve had a quart of it in the freezer – at the ready – ever since.
The idea, and the recipe were simple. I wanted something fruit-forward and crap free to cool my little pitta body through the soaring temperatures in our sweet, sweltering little house without air-conditioning. Anything resembling a frozen treat will, yes, will do this on its own because it’s ICE. But I also wanted the contents of the sorbet to be cooling energetically – I wanted to emphasize ingredients that even when served WARM help the body to cool. And that’s what makes this Apricot-Cardamom Sorbet a cooling motherlode.
The ingredients are simple, and there are just four of them: apricots, cardamom, lemon and evaporated cane juice, also known as “cane juice,” and commonly misidentified as “granulated sugar.” Three of them are cooling, and one of them is ever so slightly warming for the body, and one of them is something that most of us have grown to believe is the absolute devil…but this is not correct.
Like all inputs, the context MATTERS. And in the context of a summer sorbet made with sweet, juicy local fruits, a hot day, and a desire to cool and reduce inflammation from the core, this “devil” is no devil at all. Read on, my chill friends.
As I mentioned above, there are two ways to “chill out.” One way is to attend to temperature. The other is to attend to energy; to understand the way a substance is absorbed and utilized in the body, and this is something that we can determine by the FLAVOR that it carries. Cool and cold foods are cooling to the body by temperature. And, sweet foods are cooling energetically to the body; they soothe, reduce inflammation, ease digestion, provide mental clarity, improve focus, nourish, bolster, hydrate, and more. The apricots, cardamom, and evaporated cane juice in this recipe fall into this category. There is no sweeter food than straight-up sugars and, gasp, the evaporated cane juice in this recipe is the super cooling, anti-inflammatory ingredient in this recipe.
I know! You’ve been told that SUGAR is the inflammatory agent!
WHAT IS going on?
Well, used inappropriately, sugar IS an inflammatory ingredient.
But this is not an inappropriate use.
When I lived in Southeast Asia, many moons ago now, I recall the novelty of seeing street vendors selling slices of sugar cane served up with straws, like some kind of primitive Slurpee. Sugar cane surrounded our house, and sugar cane is and was cheap, and an easy source of energy. Raw sugars like evaporated cane juice and cane juice are also the easiest way to upload electrolytes and energy, so this made sense, especially for cultures of people for whom manual labor is the norm – cheap, easy energy is highly sensible, even if it gives you cavities because you have less success making toothpaste than you do making simple medicines. Those who struggle with insulin resistance know that sugar cane products are some of the fastest uploaded into the bloodstream, making them exceptional for athletes and individuals needing a quick hit of energy. Did you know that a molecule of glucose is also necessary to upload electrolytes in the rehydration process? If you’re looking to prevent dehydration, a tiny amount of sugar is your best friend – in whatever form you choose. These people are smart, and sweet, and so are their foods.
Years later, through the lens of Eastern medicine, I see that there’s another reason why those sugar cane vendors were so popular. In these spice cultures, the impacts of flavor on well-being, and the energetic impacts of foods and seasonal eating – places where Eastern medicine are practiced regularly – are more widely recognized. Across Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia and Vietnam, sugar cane vendors aren’t just vending cheap energy, they’re vending energetic cooling in sweltering heat.
But “sugar,” as a blanket term, has gotten a terrible rap in Western cultures. Not because sugar is intrinsically bad, but because our commercial food system has completely bastardized this powerful, simple ingredient. Commodity foods use sugar to make even the most nutritionally devoid products taste great, and so we blame sugar (instead of the system itself) for luring us into its tasty ways, creating sugar cravings, cavities and a host of other health problems when we consume all together too much sugar, particularly from processed and packaged foods.
BUT, if we’re eating predominantly whole foods, from plants, well-sourced proteins, whole grains, and spices, we aren’t eating much sugar at all. Even if we consume fruits, we’re consuming very little fructose (the type of sugar present in fruits.) And this is where the smart, specific use of this ingredient comes in.
When foods are used as medicines, for specific purposes related to the seasonal and energetic conditions our bodies face, they all take on an entirely new value. And in the case of sugar, when we want to rehydrate, uplift spirits, reduce our body temperature and lower our energetic fire in the hot summer months, evaporated cane juice, cane sugar, and other forms of sweetener are some of our best friends. They cool, rehydrate the body, and soothe the senses, and yes, evaporated cane juice (or sugar) is the secret ingredient here. It gives texture to these popsicles, makes the juicy, fruity flavors available to us, and cools our bodies from the inside out, reducing inflammation on the spot and smoothing our summer selves over.
Yep – that’s right. Your favorite holistic nutritionist and chef just told you to EAT SUGAR. In moderation, for a specific purpose. But I’m also telling you to know the difference between your sugars.
Evaporated cane juice – a staple in my kitchen – is literally the dehydrated juice of the sugar cane plant. Sugar cane contains a great number of minerals and nutrients when present in its purest forms, and short of eating the sugar cane itself on a Thai street corner, this is as close as it gets to pure, whole foods. You’ll notice that it’s a little darker in color than “granulated sugar,” which is typically pure white. This is because the fiber and impurities, minerals, and whatnot are still IN this form of sugar.
The cane juice is a similar product, though typically more artificial refining processes are used. If you see cane sugar on the grocery store shelves, this is still a pretty great option.
The product I highly recommend steering clear of is granulated sugar, and it will be labeled as such on the package. This sugar product is typically from sugar beets, not cane, and are bleached, stripped of nutrients, and then packaged up. This is the sugar that deserves a bad rap because, without the nutrients, minerals, and violating chemical processes, this is basically no longer a food at all. Evaporated cane juice, and this stuff are NOT the same.
Look for cane juice, or evaporated cane juice, use it in moderation and for specific purposes, and feel good about your choice to fuel your body with real whole foods with purpose.
There are a few other things that make this recipe specifically suitable for summer, and not for other times of the year. These things are important to know if we want to avoid the negative side effects of using the medicine of sugar at the wrong time, and for the wrong purpose.
Generally speaking, and emotionally speaking, yes – having a frozen treat is great for you in the summer. But if you aren’t making your own ice cream or sorbet, it’s very smart to know your ice cream maker, and read your labels very carefully.
Ideally, sugar is digested simply. But when you add gums like xanthan. gum and guar gum to sugar and run them through the digestive system, things get, well, gummed up, reducing sugars ability to do it’s good jobs, and often trapping this sweet substance in the gut. Not great.
Steer clear of gums in your ice cream, and in all of your foods if you can. If you’re like me, you may find that you love ice cream so much that buying an ice cream maker and taking the 15 minutes to make a batch is well worth the price for your health, and for the fact that you’ll probably make ice cream far more delicious and beneficial for your bod than any commercial ice cream maker.
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