The only bad sorbet I’ve ever had was made by me. If it wasn’t for that syrupy pineapple-flavoured stack of ice shards, I don’t think I’d be able to imagine the characteristics. What’s a bad version of winning the lottery? You’d only know when it happens.
To make a bad sorbet you need to be inept or cheap. But supermarkets distribute the cheapest foods on earth and usually the range in quality is hellish to “huh, pretty good”. Excellence needs time and care that supermarkets can’t afford, except for sorbets for some reason. I’ve done 34 supermarket product taste tests and this is right up there with the most enjoyable of the lot. Sure, the worst sorbets aren’t great but they’re far from hell. And the best, I could be convinced, was made in a gelateria with its own Chef’s Table episode.
Six friends and I tasted the sorbets blind at Solstice cafe in Sydney (they charitably let me store the sorbets in their freezer, after previously allowing my body in there). We tasted 15 products, all single-flavour fruit sorbets, predominantly lemon and mango. We scored them on texture, taste and how representative they were of the fruit, though the latter criteria wasn’t included in the final score. The final score was heavily weighted towards taste.
Besides the overall quality, the other surprise was how neither price nor fruit content was indicative of a good final score. I’d assumed sorbets with a lot of fruit in them would be both delicious and expensive, but that was not the case. Picking an excellent sorbet comes down to knowing the right brands to buy. So here we are, the best and slightly less best supermarket sorbets.
A note on lemon gelato: sorbets don’t contain dairy, but some fruit-based gelato can be similar in flavour or texture – Specially Selected (Coles) and Destination Italy (Aldi) are two good examples. We tasted them under the assumption anyone, besides the dietary-restricted, would consider lemon sorbet and gelato largely interchangeable. Both products scored 7.5 out of 10 and can charade as sorbets, though they’re slightly creamier, not particularly sour and faintly coconuty.
The best overall
Golden North Raspberry Sorbet, 1.2L, $10.90 ($0.91 per 100ml), available at select grocers
Score: 9/10
I have reviewed 571 supermarket products, and only five have scored a nine out of 10: Kettle chips (both salt and chilli flavour), Birds Eye Golden Crunch Potato Gems, Skippy Super Chunk Peanut Butter and Coles Mango Sorbet Mini Sticks. They all have one thing in common: delivering exactly what they promise. But this sorbet does more than that. It tastes as though it has been made with raspberries that have gone through a superheroic transformation. Cosmic rays, super serum or magic have turned normal raspberries into velvety, sweeter and more acidic versions of themselves. Golden North could have used the technology to create superheroes but, wisely, they chose joy over muscle.
The best value
Gelativo Mango Sorbet, 1L, $6.50 ($0.65 per 100ml), available at Woolworths
Score: 8/10
As far as I can tell, supermarket mango sorbets don’t use single mango varieties (and if they do, they don’t advertise it). I’d love a 100% Kensington pride or maha chanok sorbet, but if I can’t get that, the next best thing is something like this: what I’m guessing is an all-encompassing mango blend that hints at different varieties and stages of ripeness, resulting in something soft, spongy and quite approachable. “Polite, like a committee came together to make this,” one reviewer wrote. Like whacking a 00s pop song on the house-party stereo, generic may not be interesting, but it can make you feel great.
The best mango sorbet
Coles Finest Luxury Mango Sorbet, 500ml, $7 ($1.40 per 100ml), available at Coles
Score: 8.5/10
My partner has asked me many times: what is the point of mango sorbet when a frozen cheek of Kensington pride is so good? The answer: to have the same taste experience, in scoopable form, whenever you want. That’s what this is. It has the highest fruit percent of any mango sorbet we tried and, likely due to that, it has the texture of mango pulp, and tastes and smells like fresh mango. I’d guess there’s at least some Kensington pride in there which, if you’re measuring by quantity of pleasure created, is surely up there with Steve Irwin and the Great Barrier Reef in the pantheon of greatest Australian things of all time.
The best lemon sorbet
Golden North Lemon Sorbet, 1.2L, $10.90 ($0.91 per 100ml), available at select grocers
Score: 8/10
Despite containing just 4% lemon juice, this was voted the most lemony sorbet of the day. I attribute that to the slight bitterness, as though some zest was blended in. It reminds me of the lemon sorbets of Italian restaurants with complimentary bread and waiters who deserve long-service leave. At the end of a meal of cheese, red-sauce pasta and noise, what sorbet do you need? One that’s so intensely sour and sweet, you forget everything that’s come before it.
The rest
Coles Finest Luxury Lemon Sorbet, 500ml, $7 ($1.40 per 100ml), available at Coles
Score: 7.5/10
The complete opposite experience of Golden North: a sorbet that’s more than 19% lemon that tastes like “a blended icy pole”, “lemon drop vibes” and “primary school nostalgia”. As one reviewer summarised: “This doesn’t taste like a real lemon at all but it’s extremely delicious.” It may not be a “luxury experience”, but it has a place: in the dessert diet of lemonade lovers and nostalgia seekers, and in the freezer of anyone who can’t find Golden North’s lemon sorbet.
Bravo Gelato Like Me Lemon Sorbet, 750ml, $12.99 ($1.73 per 100ml), available at select grocers
Score: 7.5/10
By far the most texturally unique sorbet we tried. While most brands seem to be going for a smooth, velvety texture or a denser, gummy chew, this is, as one reviewer said, like eating compacted snow. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to you, but aesthetes should know this: it is not easy to scoop in a beautiful spherical form. The flavour was less divisive; it’s a classic lemon sorbet experience, but slightly sweeter and more acidic than its competitors. “Reminds me of a homemade lemon sorbet,” one reviewer wrote, just lemon, sugar and ice.
Coles Finest Luxury Blueberry Sorbet, 500ml, $7 ($1.40 per 100ml), available at Coles
Score: 7/10
This sorbet is trying too hard. It’s like the archetypal jock who, so eager to prove himself, just exposes his insecurities. Instead of accepting blueberries’ nature – subtle, slightly acidic and delicate – this is a projection of manufactured berry power. Imagine the most generic, sweet, candied berry flavour, like berry roll-ups condensed into a sorbet. It’s not a bad experience (the texture is incredible), just a sad one. If romcom movies have taught us anything, when it comes to jock characters there is something delicate and beautiful inside, it’s just hard to find. But if you like unspecified-berry-flavoured candy or the scent of blueberry bath bombs, this is extremely for you.
Weis Mango Sorbet, 1L, $10 ($1 per 100ml), available at major supermarkets
Score: 6/10
This sorbet is 42% mango and when you have so much of one ingredient, it matters what state that ingredient is in. My guess is Weis is using overripe R2E2s. That’s the only explanation I have for the powerfully tropical, almost fermented flavour. It’s very mango-y, just not the kind I like. But anyone with a great fondness for longans, grapes and the custardy flesh of overripe R2E2s might love this. If you’ve never tried an R2E2 that tastes like this, you could, as some reviewers did, think this tastes almost artificial, like a bad attempt at manufacturing mango flavour.
Bravo Gelato Mighty Miss Mango Sorbet, 750ml, $12.99 ($1.73 per 100ml), available at select grocers
Score: 4.5/10
Of all the mango sorbets we tried, this was the only one that failed the does-this-taste-like-fruit test. The reviewers had bizarre descriptions for it, relating it to freezer air and various other appliances. The texture was similarly confusing, with reviewers describing it as spongy, rubbery and bouncy. The back of the tub confuses things more. Stabilisers, emulsifiers and thickeners can explain the texture, but the main ingredient is mango (in many sorbets, the main ingredient is water). So how did they make mango taste like this? It’s as if they hired an alchemist to create a new mango flavour and, hoping to draw out their best work, tortured them in desperation, only for the alchemist to betray them by turning mangoes into coolant.
Amazonia Açai Sorbet Original, 500ml, $9.50 ($1.90 per 100ml), available at Woolworths
Score: 4/10
Of all the food trends to hit this country, acai is my least favourite. We’re importing frozen berry pulp from halfway across the world instead of eating local berries, we’ve seen a proliferation of misleading superfood claims and we’ve ended up with products like this taking up space in our lives. Now, with the rigour of a blind taste test, I could finally get affirmation, and boy did I. Reviewers criticised the grainy and slimy texture, and said it tastes to them like incredibly sweet overripe bananas, olive oil, turpentine and health foods you find in the back of your friend’s mum’s fridge. “From the dark brown colour to the overripe fruity flavour, an assault to the senses,” one wrote. Another said simply: “Appalling.”
