Poached fruit is a great way to amp up not only the overall appearance of a dish, but it's a less expected way to compliment all the flavours of a dish.
How to make poaching liquid:
A basic poaching liquid is simply made by combining water and sugar with a 1.5 to 1 ratio.
Ingredients:
3 L of water
2 cup of sugar- we recommend choosing a sugar option other than refined white sugar. We use cane sugar with a little bit of demerara sugar/brown sugar. This combination will both boost nutrition value and bring out a caramelized flavour.
Optional: add spice + flavour component of choice. We added: 2 cinnamon sticks, 1 tbsp anise seed (or 3 star anise pods) & 2 stings of lemongrass.
Other flavour ideas we've enjoyed: ginger, lemon / orange peel, cardamom, clove, vanilla bean, nutmeg, coffee bean, rosemary, sage.
Tools:
Knife
Cutting board
Wooden spoon
Saucepan
Method:
1. Simply combine water and sugar in a pot and heat it up enough to dissolve the sugar, a simmer should be more than adequate. At this point add your flavour ingredients, such as the spices listed above.
2. Now that your ingredients are simmering you can add in your fruit! You can select almost any type of fruit, the most common are:
Apples.
Pears.
Rhubarb.
Figs.
Peaches and other stone fruits like apricots, plums and nectarines.
Oranges
3. For this post we'll stick with apples as it's a component of my latest meal shown in the cover photo of this post.
4. It's your preference as to if you'd like to peel the fruit, so for this recipe we will.
5. Take 4 apples, we used a combination of Gala, Honey Crisp and Granny Smith but ultimately any apple will do.
6. Peel the apples, then cut them in half and then in half again and then again. You want nice slices that are thick enough to hold their shape but not take too much time to cook through.
7. Once you have the apples cut, throw them in the simmering pot and allow for them to cook down.
8. Make sure there is enough liquid to cover the fruit! As you can see in the photo below, this pot is slightly overfilled with apples, so I just added in more water and a little sugar to balance it out.
9. This is an easy type of recipe to eyeball and make according to whatever ingredients you have on hand or need to use up from the kitchen. To ensure a delicious outcome taste the poaching liquid and sweeten / flavour to your liking.
10. At this point you'd cover the fruit with a cartouche (parchment paper with a little hole in the middle), but I used a lid covering 2/3 of the pot instead which also works.
11. Simmer for 25 to 30 minutes or until the fruit is soft. At that point, remove from heat and let the poached apples cool in their syrupy liquid.
12. From here the apples are ready to serve. You can use it top your favourite breakfast meals, desserts or as a sweet component in a savoury dish!
13. Store in a jar in the fridge.
To make a simple-syrup:
A natural homemade sweetener, it's great to have on-hand in the summer for iced drinks, spiced however you like- follow the recipe above but with a ratio of equal parts sugar to water (sugar to water = 1:1).
Enjoy and more to come!
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