Earlier this week we gave you some tips on using unripe fruit. But there's the other end of the spectrum — fruit that's about to give up the ghost.
Read our suggestions for using it fast...
Fruit that's soft and squishy can serve a lot of purposes. Even if it's wrinkled and has lost much of its juice, it can still be used in recipes where it's cooked down or baked (in other words, you don't need it to be plump and pretty). Here are our suggestions:
Make a quick bread. Of course, we all know brown bananas are great for banana bread. But peaches, nectarines, and strawberries are also great in breads or muffins.
Make jam. Dana gave us a great strawberry refrigerator jam, using up some overripe strawberries. Jam involves nothing more than boiling down fruit with sugar and a little lemon juice — it's going to get soft, mushy, and slightly browner anyway.
Put it in a cobbler. Use our template for easy cobbler for any fruit. It's a great way to use up a large quantity.
Mash it up for pancakes. When we wrote about blueberry pancakes on Monday, a reader named Marisa emailed to tell us about her boyfriend's tip of smashing blueberries with a potato masher, then blending them into his batter so it turns purple. We love it! We're imagining pink-tinted pancakes made with mashed up strawberries, or orange-tinted ones from overripe peaches and nectarines.
Cook it down into a sauce for meat. Overripe fruit, if it hasn't lost all of its juice, can still impart some good flavor to a sauce. Chop it into small bits (or whiz it in a blender) and add it to some chicken stock and balsamic vinegar to make a glaze or sauce for meat. You could even substituted it for the apricot jam in our Chicken with Shallot-Apricot Sauce.
Blend it into a salad dressing.If it doesn't look pretty enough to chop on top of your salad (like Laure's lovely peach version), put it in a blender with some olive oil, vinegar, herbs, and seasonings. It can make a great, sweet dressing for a salad with some salty nuts or cheese.
What else would you do with overripe fruit?
Related: Quick Tip: What To Do with Unripe Fruit
(Image: Flickr member freddie boy, licensed for use under Creative Commons)
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when it starts growing mold it goes from my "use immediately" list to my "toss it" list.
thank you :)
perfect timing!
I had a friend who grew up during Communism in Hungary. She was always shocked by the food that I thought ought to be thrown away. She would cut away the bad part and use the rest. I learned a lot from her.
Later I read the diaries of Victor Klemperer who was a Jew who managed to miraculously survive WWII in Dresden. What he and his wife ate puts an entirely different picture to one's attitude to food. I'm not being holier than thou--I LOVE food and so did they, but you realize that what we think is acceptable and what is in fact acceptable are two entirely different things.
One of my goals for this year is not to throw away food, to try to find a way to use it. Out of respect for Victor Klemperer and for the food and for the people who took the trouble to raise it and make it available. It really is a miracle, the abundance with which we live.
yea, i dont do anything with moldy fruit... however when i have too many that are at their peak ripeness and i know i wont get to them all, i chop them up, freeze, blend and freeze again for homemade sorbet. ive done this with a lot of peaches this year.
A fruit crisp is easier than a cobbler and has more fiber, etc. I just throw together a crisp topping with some oatmeal, whatever chopped nuts I've got around the kitchen, a little bit of sugar, a bit of whole wheat flour and a couple tablespoons of melted butter or even oil would probably work. No, I don't measure things, just throw in what looks right and it always comes out pretty good.
But we had a whole bag of peaches from the farmer's market that got hideously bruised on the way home some how. They made a great crisp. In years past, I would have been tempted to just chuck the whole bag because it looked so hopelessly messy, but food costs are so high these days. It was ten dollars worth of peaches and only six of them survived the trip home in good enough condition for regular eating. But I had breakfast three days in a row of peach crisp.
My favorite thing to do with "past-its-prime" fruit is to make a jam-like sauce (fruit, a touch of sugar, a touch of juice for liquid, let it simmer in a pot on the stove). I throw whatever I have into the pot and it always comes out a little different.
I stir it into yogurt for breakfasts.
I put overripe bananas in smoothies with unsweetened chocolate soy milk - delicious and healthy chocolate banana shake!
I throw the overripe fruits into the blender and use my dehydrator to make homemade fruit leather which is my kid's favorite "healthy" snack. Apples, pears, plums, peaches, and berries in any combination usually yield the best results.