Lemon Sorbet

 first of all, can I see your recipe?

Second of all, homemade sorbet is very difficult, especially if you want a pure juice sorbet, a good freezing contraption is required to make the sorbet crystals small enough so that it becomes smooth in your mouth.  Traditional ice cream has enough fat and other stabilizers (such as eggs) to lower the freezing point and prevent large crystals from forming but juice has no such safeguards beyond sugar content.

So there are four ways to make your homemade sorbet creamier.

a)  Change your sugar content to consist of between 25-30% of the overall weight of the sorbet.  You can go up to around 33% and get something you can easily scoop and make great quenelles straight from the freezer but you run the risk of making your sorbet too sweet.  You can go around this by replacing a portion of your sugar with glucose or corn syrup, which is less sweet than table sugar (sucrose) and helps stabilize the mixture.  Note that fruit also has its own sugar, so if you make a sorbet with a sweeter fruit you can go a little easier on the sugar.  You can usually test this at home by placing a whole egg in your sorbet, if it floats enough to reveal a dime-sized area of shell exposed then your density should be just right.

b)  The amount of bulk matter in your sorbet also helps, thicker/pulpier mixtures such as pureed strawberries will spin nicer than watery mixes (such as lemon juice)

c)  Add a stabilizer.  Buy either a sorbet stabilizer, egg whites or a small amount of gelatin (a gram or two per liter), which will help your sorbet develop smaller ice crystals.

d)  Use a contraption that freezes your mix quickly.  A quality ice cream maker, pacojet, liquid nitrogen are all good restaurant options but as a home cook your tools are probably more limited.  A 300 dollar electric ice cream maker should be able to do okay.

I make sorbet at home using a $45 Cuisinart 1.5 quart ice cream maker.  Works great.

The other antifreeze ingredient is alcohol.  Vodka is very versatile, particularly for extracting flavors from herbs & spices.  A lot of recipes call for putting herbs or spices in the sugar syrup.  You'll get a lot more bang by steeping them in an ounce or two of vodka.  Star anise/graprefruit, rosemary/lemon, etc.

The proportions are good for a sorbet (though technically a sorbet shouldn't have butterfat in it), but the method of freezing points more to a granita style of ice, which yields a granular, icy product.  To make a smoother product you will need a machine that can churn the mixture continually while it freezes.  You can start with a manual hand crank device or an inexpensive electric churner for less than 50 dollars and move up to more expensive models that have their own refrigeration unit.

how much egg white would you say to put in?

and does the floating egg trick work regardless of what you add to the mix??

im assuming the floating egg is a function of density/ specific gravity?