Wood Apple Sherbet Drink | Refreshing Summer Recipe

Today I'm going to show you a sherbet recipe that's kind of unusual because of the rare fruit it's made from. This Sherbet is basically seasoned fruit juice/punch, not to confuse with the icy dessert. I only tried this fruit last year, so it's pretty novel for me atleast.

Wood apple is known by way too many names, some of them being elephant apple, stone apple, shivadruma, mapinbel, bel fruit, marmelos, etc. It is not as popular as far as fruits go, maybe because it's not cultivated worldwide and is mostly available in certain tropical islands and some South Asian countries.

Bel Fruit has a hard shell (as you can see with my lame attempts at trying to break it) and soft fleshy pulp. The drink I'm going to show you reminds me of peach cocktails because of its texture, but it has refreshing tones of most summer fruits and the smell is sort of like melons, except sweeter.

Marmelos is a pretty ancient fruit (references are found in Indian ayurvedic texts that go back some 4000 years) and that data is enough for us to call it a vintage drink ;) The fruit is also known for it's many medicinal properties in alternative medicine...but let's not go there. One thing I can say from experience is that it's super refreshing and might have worked as a mild natural detox drink. Moving on.

Ingredients:

- Wood apple / Marmelos
- Sugar
- Regular salt or pink salt (to be fancy)
- Cardamom powder
- Chilled water

Other supplies:

- juicer/mixer/food processor
- glasses, mixing spoons & bowl

1. Break the fruit like you would a coconut but don't use that much pressure. I tried with a knife (and failed) and then with a pestle (worked!), but a small hammer would do it quickly, I think.

2. Scoop out the flesh with a spoon. Separate the seeds and blend the fruit pulp until you get a smooth squash.

A Smooth Tip: If the texture has too much fibre or roughage at this point, you can add water and strain it before adding any seasoning. Skip water in the next step.

3. Season the squash with salt, sugar, cardamom and add water as per your liking. Stir and sip up!

Making this recipe gave me real vintage summer vibes, plus I was feeling more cottagecore than usual so I went ahead and did a cheesy aesthetic edit on this video, fairycore starry dazzle bling and all. ;) Let me know in the comments if you think it's cool. Let me know if you don't. I like to know either way.