Matthew Woolen is a master pastry chef and has worked in a variety of Seattle restaurants, including gastropub Old Sage, Zhu Dang, and a gluten-free restaurant called Capitol Cider.

Matthew Woolen

Fruit juice, frozen on a stick. There are few things as simple and satisfying as a popsicle on a sweltering summer day. This sweet and tart pomegranate pop delivers icy refreshment with minimal prep work in the kitchen—a big plus when it’s hot outside and the last thing you want to do is spend hours cooking over a hot stove.There are a lot of variables that affect the texture of frozen treats. Fat, protein, sugar, stabilizers, air, freezing rate, and serving temperature all contribute to the mouthfeel of ice cream, for example. Knowing how to properly dial in those factors can spell the difference between a silky-smooth scoop and a disappointingly icy one. Fortunately, for fruit juice pops, the formula for success is a lot simpler. There’s no churning involved, or milkfat percentages to calculate. It mostly just comes down to sugar.Along with its sweetening properties, sugar changes the texture of frozen desserts by depressing (lowering) the freezing point of water. Fruit juice is a solution composed mostly of water and sugar, with most juices falling in a range of 13 to 16 percent sugar, which can be expressed using the Brix scale. If you freeze fruit juice as is, you’ll basically end up with a lightly sweetened ice cube—not exactly a treat. But if you dissolve more sugar into that juice, in this case raising the sugar content of the solution to 26° Brix, the mixture will take on a softer, more palatable texture when frozen.The syrup made with the added sugar keeps some of the water in liquid state, and encourages the formation of smaller ice crystals. All of this results in a popsicle with the perfect texture: this is still an ice-pop, not a chewy frozen fruit bar, but it’s just soft enough to bite into on a hot day.

Pomegranate Popsicles