If you don’t have an ice-cream machine, an easy way to make delicious fresh fruit ices is to freeze your sweetened fruit pulp solid in a tray and scratch it up into frosty shards with a strong fork just before serving. This is what Italians would call a granita. The texture is a little crunchier than a classic sorbet, but still wonderful. In fact, even though I have an excellent machine, I often make this strawberry granita in preference to a smoother sorbet. It’s sweet, tart, fruity and endlessly refreshing.

Ingredients:

To serve 6–8
Crush a kilo of strawberries and rub them through a nylon sieve to extract the seeds.

Whisk in up to 200g icing sugar and the juice of 1–2 lemons to sweeten and sharpen to taste. The mix should be a little too sweet and a little too sharp, to allow for the fact that both tastes will be muted slightly when it is frozen.

Pour the purée into a bowl or large Tupperware tub, ideally so it is no deeper than about 4cm, so it will freeze quickly. Put in the freezer until solid. Defrost for about half an hour before serving, then use a robust fork to scrape up the surface of the frozen fruit, piling the frosty shards into glasses. Serve quickly, before it has time to melt.