Stewing Fruit

Stewing fruit is the technique whereby you slowly cook fruit in a little water and sugar, over a low heat until it is cooked through. Often you stew fruit for pies, tarts, making compotes or even to make homemade apple sauce for pork.

Its a very simple technique and a good one to have in your arsenal. If you didn't stew the fruit beforehand for pies, for example, you may get lumps of uncooked fruit in your pie, which is not nice at all. So stewing before hand is always a good idea.

Ingredients
450g prepared fruit, be it apples, rhubarb or blackberries
2 tbsp water
*Sugar (For example if you were using cooking apples and blackberries,I would use 75g of sugar)

*The amount of sugar you need depends on the fruit, how ripe it is and also personal taste.  As a general rule you can roughly gauge the sugar needed by saying to yourself , can i eat this fruit raw ? if so it is generally a sweet fruit, so would need less sugar. If however you wouldn't eat this fruit, for example rhubarb or cooking apples, you then would need more. It is a goo idea to add and taste as you go.

**Added flavour
There are lots of additional flavours or ingredients you can add to fruit at the stewing stage to bring it alive. For example when i'm stewing apples, I often add cinnamon or if i'm making a winter better compote, i like to add brandy, star anise and orange peel.

Method

1. Place the fruit in a non stick pan with the sugar, the water and any additional ingredients ** you like to add.
2. Bring to the boil over a medium heat, then retudue the head and gentle simmer, with the pan partly covered until the fruit is soft. Stirring often.