Fruit in Recipes

Have you ever made a beautiful fruit salad only to have it turn brown before you could serve it? A bit of light-flavored honey mixed into the fruit will take care of that. The small amount of natural acid in honey keeps fruit looking fresh.

You should never add gelatin to a dish or dessert that contains fresh pineapple. An enzyme called bromelain prevents gelatin from setting properly. Gelatin, however, works fine with canned pineapple.

When you're following a recipe that calls for pineapple on any meat, you need to be careful. Wait until just before serving the dish to add any fresh pineapple. The same enzyme that stops gelatin from setting up will make the meat fall apart if it's on the meat too long.

If lemons, oranges, or other citrus fruits are cold, you'll have a hard time getting the maximum juice from them. All you need to do to correct this is take fruit out of the refrigerator a few hours before you're going to squeeze them and get them to room temperature. (If you forget to take the fruit out early, simply run them under warm water for a minute, or put them it in the microwave for just ten or fifteen seconds.) Then roll them back and forth on a hard surface under the pressure of your palm. Now when you squeeze your lemons, you'll get plenty of juice.

When a recipe calls for the rind of an orange, lemon, or other citrus fruit, do you sometimes get some of the bitter white pith mixed in? The best way to avoid this problem is to use a potato peeler instead of a grater to evenly remove a layer of rind. You can then mince the rind into tiny pieces with a knife or your grinder.

If you freeze blueberries and later use them for your pies, cakes, or muffins, don't bother to thaw them out. Thawing them will cause blueberry juice to run through all the cake or muffin batter that you are baking, making it an unappetizing green color.