This week I was put in charge of making a new vegan raspberry sherbet.

We had a recipe, it was straightforward enough. Add everything but the oat yogurt together, bring to a boil, handblend that and the yogurt together and pass it and freeze.

While getting all the ingredients into a pot, I ran out of sugar, so I had to go refill the box from dry storage and add the last 200g of sugar to the pot. Which I did, and put the pot to boil while working on my backlog of prep

What I hadn’t noticed was that our dishwasher had been cleaning the dry storage during a quiet day, and they’d accidentally switched the lids on the salt and sugar containers, both of which are clearly labeled “SALT” and “SUGAR”.

We realised what had happened when my coworker tasted the stuff in the pot and said “boy, you put salt in this.” With a bewildered look on his face. I know he wasn’t the kind of guy to make a joke like that so my heart sank when I realised I’d fucked up somehow.

While my sous chef was shouting about how “we’re chefs we should know these things” we tried coming up with how to fix it. 200g of salt ended up being around 3% of the total weight of the product. So we decided to try adding more beetroot juice, lemon juice, vegan cream and finally combine it with the oat yogurt to make an end product that was still pretty salty, but closer to 1%

Next day, when we had frozen it and rolled it in the pacojet, the end result was a savory beetroot sherbet, a pretty unique flavour that somehow ended up working out really well. Very different from the raspberry sherbet we were going for though.