Receta Watermelon Granita With Mesquite Smoked Salt
This all started when I bought a watermelon for a Labor Day Barbeque at our house. I'd had so much fun making Watermelon Mousse that I decided what this house needs is more watermelon!! I was catching the tail end of the season here for good local watermelon but I secured one and decided that I'd make the watermelon mousse again for our Labor Day guests, but then I got lazy, one thing led to another and I decided on my crowdpleasereverybodysfiveagain desert for holiday cook outs, homemade vanilla ice cream and boxes of various types of cones. Make your own ice cream cone with sprinkles or... whatever. It always works and it's always fun to see people revert, and yet I had this watermelon just sitting there taking up space in the fridge. What to do?
I decided to juice it. A bunch of friends have recently gotten themselves fancy juicers and blenders but I've still got my trusty old Oster. No fancy bells and whistles but it works. I chunked the watermelon into the blender and juiced it. I mixed it with some iced green tea, fizzy water, a dash of lime juice and chia seeds. I figured that everybody would be hitting the beer and I'd be the only one drinking my watermelon concoction. Boy was I wrong. I barely got any. They liked it that much. I did what any other normal person would do. I bought more watermelon and juiced it. So there I was with a pitcher full of watermelon juice and nowhere to go. There had to be something else I could do with this stuff. Something like say.....granita?
Granita, the perfect lazy individuals dessert. Pour stuff in the freezer and stir it with a fork every now and then. It does not get very much easier than that. Want this? Grab your watermelons and you can be enjoying this within a couple of hours.
Watermelon Granita
Here's What You Need:
1 seedless watermelon
a 13 x 12 glass baking dish..or smaller if you wish
1 Tbs of sugar
Here's What To Do:
Chunk the watermelon and blend it to juice in a blender or food processor.
Pour it into the baking dish.
Stir in 1 Tbs of sugar. I do this because I want to keep the juice from freezing into a solid mass and sugar helps prevent that.
Rake the mixture with a fork after 30 minutes breaking the juice up into icy crystals. Keep doing this at 30 minute intervals for about 2 hours or until it's icy enough to scoop into a bowl.
While I was waiting for my juice to freeze, I was wondering just what I could do to zip things up a bit. I figured that a lot of people (okay my family) has always sprinkled their watermelon with salt. But I didn't just want any salt. How about smoked salt? How about full on barbeque mesquite smoked salt?? Why not? Couldn't hurt. So I smoked some salt in a stove top smoker. It took 20 minutes.
Light, refreshing, and above all easy, I dished up the combo of watermelon granita with a smokey dash of mesquite. Did it work? Yeah, it worked. For real. I'll be passing along the directions for that in a day or so. Meanwhile, I've got a great fish curry to share and there's Bibi's treats coming up. Follow along on Twitter @kathygori