Community Corner
The World's Worst Cook Explains a Bombe
A tasty bombe can atone for a multitude of culinary bombs.
Being known as inept in the kitchen has its advantages. No one asks you to help prepare the canapés before the crowd arrives, for example.
When assignments are doled out in advance of holiday dinners, good cooks are asked to bring their specialties—enough to feed 20 or 30 people—while the bad cooks get stuck with safe tasks, like a relish tray or green salad. One in-law always asks me to “bring the vegetable,” knowing no one in her family eats vegetables anyway. It doesn’t matter how overcooked or undercooked they are.
And that’s good. Honestly, if I were to advise any young person about making their mark at the family dinner, I would tell them to avoid the spectacular. Bring a bowl of lettuce, preferably wilted. Or condiments—can’t go wrong with catsup.
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Here’s the truth: if you bring something good, you’ll be asked to outdo yourself every year thereafter. You’ll never enjoy a party again—you’ll be too stressed over the state of your soufflé.
That being said, I often get asked to bring dessert, because relatives and friends know I’ll deliver. I pick up something sinful from Marie Callendars or The Cheesecake Factory, and no one cares that I didn't prepare it with my own two hands.
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Since discovering this recipe for an Ice Cream Bombe in the Barefoot Contessa’s Barefoot in Paris cookbook, however, I now assemble the dessert myself and wait for the compliments to roll in.
Assemble is the operative word here. A bombe is two or more flavors of ice cream (or sorbet or sherbet) frozen into layers in the shape of a bowl. This is not something I have to cook (well, there is a sauce, but it’s not strictly necessary). I simply buy sorbet and ice cream and assemble it.
Here’s what you need:
- 2 pints of good mango sorbet (I recommend Haagen Dazs)
- 1-1/2 pints of good raspberry sorbet
- 1 pint of good strawberry ice cream (“Good” means exactly that. Don’t scrimp on the ingredients!)
Directions:
You’ll need a bowl—metal or pyrex—seven to eight inches across and four to six inches deep.
- Put the bowl in the freezer and take the mango sorbet out of the freezer. Wait 30 minutes.
- Take the bowl out of the freezer. Martha Stewart suggests lining the bowl with plastic wrap at this point, which may help the mold slide out of the bowl later.
- Scoop up the softened sorbet and line the bowl—bottom and sides—with it. Use spoons or a spatula to make the lining as uniformly thick as possible.
- Put the bowl back in the freezer and take out the raspberry sorbet. Wait 30 minutes.
- Take the bowl out of the freezer. Scoop up the softened raspberry sorbet and press it on top of the mango sorbet, making another layer, as uniformly thick as possible.
- Put the bowl back in the freezer and take out the strawberry ice cream. Wait 30 minutes.
- Take the bowl out again, and fill the remaining space with strawberry ice cream. Cover with plastic wrap, using your hand to flatten the surface as much as possible. Freeze.
- When you’re ready to serve it, dunk the bowl into warm water up to the rim for a few seconds, to loosen the edge of the ice cream. Run a knife around the edge too. Then put a flat plate over the bowl, and turn the whole thing upside down so it falls onto the plate. Put it back in the freezer for a minute or two, then cut it like a pie or cake.
To make the sauce in advance you'll need:
- A pint of fresh or frozen raspberries
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup water
- 1 cup seedless raspberry jam
- 1 tablespoon Framboise, Chambord, or St. Germaine
Directions:
- Put on an apron. Raspberries stain.
- Put the raspberries, sugar and water in a saucepan, turn up the heat, stir once or twice and bring to a boil. If you're using an electric range, turn another burner on to low heat.
- Once the mix is boiling, lower the heat or move the pot to the lower-set burner. Stir. Let it simmer for four minutes (five minutes if you started with frozen raspberries).
- Put the jam and liqueur in a bowl, and pour in the simmered raspberries. Using either a food processor with a steel blade, or an immersion blender, or even an osterizer if that's all you have, blend the ingredients till smooth.
- Chill. The sauce will keep for several days.
Once you have the basics of a bombe, you can play with the flavors. Martha Stewart composes a “Watermelon Bombe” of pistachio ice cream, then vanilla (which together look like the rind) and filled with watermelon sorbet. She adds broken cookies as the watermelon seeds.
Next time I might drizzle chocolate sauce over a bombe of orange sherbet outside a coconut-flavored layer, with rich chocolate ice cream in the middle. Now how many recipes let you mix and match flavors like that?