Using Homegrown Fruits to Make Cool Treats for Summer Days

Our resident gardening expert has some delicious ideas for eco-friendly sweets.

When the weather is warm, it is great to be able to reach into the freezer and enjoy a healthy treat. Better yet, popsicles, sorbets, or fruity ice creams can all be made using produce you have grown yourself in your garden. Hyper-local and packaging-free, making your own is the eco-friendliest way to go.

Here are some ideas to help you use homegrown fruits to make cool treats for summer days:

One of the easiest ways to make use of fresh produce is simply to make and freeze a fruit puree or fruit syrup in a mold to make popsicles that your family can enjoy.

Sweeter fruits can be blended and frozen without additional sweetening. But with tarter fruits, like some citrus fruits or berries, you might like to add the sweetener of your choice before you pour the mix into molds and place these in the freezer.

A more grown-up version of popsicles is to make homemade sorbets. You do not need an ice-cream maker or any special equipment to do so. Using just fresh fruit juices can create quite a hard sorbet, but adding alcohol, honey, or corn syrup can lower the freezing point and make for a softer sorbet.

The key thing to remember when making a sorbet is that you will need to freeze for a while, then use a fork to break up the ice crystals a few times—returning it to the freezer each time and stopping when it is firm, but you can scoop it easily.

I like to make raspberry sorbet, for example, which pairs very nicely with chocolate desserts.

Similar to a sorbet, but typically a little more granular and crystalline in texture, a granita is a semi-frozen desert that could also be great on a hot day. This, too, is something that you can make yourself at home without special equipment.

Usually, it combines homegrown fruits with a sweetener, if desired, and sometimes additional flavorings. Frozen like the sorbets mentioned above, with occasional agitation, it is then typically scraped or shaved to produce separated crystals for serving. It is lighter and less compact than a sorbet on the whole, though it is a similar idea.

A gooseberry and mint granita is one idea for a dinner party in the summer months, and it can be as sweet or as tart as you personally prefer.

If you have an ice dispenser in your fridge-freezer then you might also consider making your own fruit syrups that can simply be poured over crushed ice on demand for cool treats on hot summer days.

These snow cones can taste far better than the snow cones or slushies that you can buy, with all their added colors and artificial flavors. And you can have a lot more control over how much sugar you and your family consume.

All of the ideas above are vegan ones, but if you eat dairy, then of course, you might also make forays into ice cream and make your own fruity ice cream flavors using some of the fresh produce you grow. (You can also use coconut milk or coconut cream or other non-dairy alternative.)

Making ice cream will be much easier if you have an ice cream maker. But you can also make ice cream in a simple, gadget-free way.

For a slightly healthier alternative, you might also experiment with adding different berries or fruits to yogurt to make frozen yogurt at home. For example, you can layer yogurt and fruit puree in a popsicle mold or yogurt pot for a quick and easy treat.

There are many different recipes that you might follow to make a cool treat for summer days using the produce that you grow in your garden. And when you make your own rather than buying these treats, you can control exactly what goes into them and ensure that you make a healthy and more sustainable choice.