Red Dragonfruit Granita

Post Update: This made the Top 9 on Foodbuzz today.

It's my first time, so is it too silly to be excited about this? (ahh, who cares... I'll just be excited anyway!)

After my earlier post on the dragonfruit quenchers, I still had several dragonfruits left over so I thought, "Wouldn't it be pretty if I turn this gorgeous pink-red fruit into a sorbet?" I'd seen many posts on white fleshed dragonfruit sorbets (always inevitably served in it's skin shell - helloooo.... what happened to originality?), but hardly ever red dragonfruit sorbets. That was what I'd started to do when I suddenly, deflatedly remembered that I didn't have an ice-cream maker and no way was I ever going to process this mixture fine enough by hand, even if I had set up camp by the freezer for half a day!

So the next best thing? Granita. It's great to have on a hot, hot day and for this particular recipe, I decided to accentuate the not-so-flavorful dragonfruit with lime zest, grapefruit zest and fresh ginger slices steeped in sugar syrup! The smell of the hot syrup was heavenly, and I was truly tempted to just add it to some cold water, slip in some lime slices and glug it down like a thirsty desert dweller. Thank goodness my willpower won and I managed to save the syrup for the granita. ;-)

My styling for the photography kind of sucks because I was trying to shoot this extra fast before it all turned into slush. At least, the color of the fuschia bourgainvillea from my garden complemented the granita very well and hmmm... not a dragonfruit skin receptacle in sight!

These babies bleed and stain! But they wash off quite easily, don't worry

  My flavored syrup, with lime, grapefruit zest & fresh ginger

Good enough to drink!

 So refreshingly pretty!

Red Dragonfruit Granita

Ingredients:
1 Dragonfruit
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1/2 inch fresh ginger, sliced
1/2 lime zest
1/4 grapefruit zest

Method:

1. Boil the water with the sliced ginger, lime and grapefruit zests, then sir in sugar until dissolved. Remove from heat and let the syrup cool. Once cooled, strained the bits and use the sugar syrup to make the granita.

2. Cut the dragonfruit in half and scoop out the flesh. Place in a blender and add the sugar syrup, puree until smooth.

3. Pour into a deep dish or container and place in a freezer. After an hour, mash with a fork and repeat the process for the next 3-4 hours until it becomes ice "crystals", which is the granita.