Syrup fruit: the tastiest way to preserve fruit

An ancestral technique to preserve fruit has always been to chop it into small pieces and place it in a syrup of water, sugar, and lemon. The other solution is to cook it and then jar it to obtain jam.

Canned fruit is a product that has seen a significant increase in sales (also online) in recent years, not only, as one might think, in the winter period but also during the hottest summer months. This is due to its versatility of use, even with other fresh products typical of the intermediate months of the year: ice cream, fruit cakes, smoothies, and other summer recipes are particularly suitable to be garnished and enhanced with canned fruit.

Canned fruit: what is the best?

But what could be the fruit that best adapts to the preservation technique in jars with syrup? Firstly, this fruit must have a firm flesh and, when cut, it should have a nice texture. It can never be too ripe and must, of course, show no imperfections of any kind. Its fiber should be particularly firm and not overly crumbly. A canned apple from fresh cannot be an ideal solution; it is better if it has been previously dehydrated, as is done, for example, with the pink apples from the Monti Sibillini from our supplier Le Spiazzette. Peaches, apricots, plums, cherries, pears are the main types of fruit that can be preserved in syrup.

The best peaches that can be preserved in a sugar syrup are certainly percoca peaches, which always have greater firmness, compactness, a better more resistant fiber, and a flavor that always remains particularly marked with notes of peach and sweet almond at the finish.

Sour cherries are another product that lends itself very well to the practice of preservation in syrup. In particular, visciole have the characteristic, precisely because they are particularly sour, of maintaining a nice freshness even after being canned.

Canned fruit: how to use it in cooking and pairings

Canned fruit can be easily used for many preparations as well as for various garnishes and embellishments of dishes to serve at the table. Usually, canned fruit is used at the end of a meal paired with ice cream, typically cream flavors, depending on the type of fruit used. Cream tends to be preferred, although canned sour cherries pair very well with fruit-flavored ice creams, particularly strawberry and cherry. Canned fruit is excellent to pair at the end of a meal with a good dessert wine made from white grapes. It is pleasant to enjoy together with dried fruit or with dark chocolate shavings.

Bernardo Pasquali