How to Make Candied Fruit
Good fruits for candying include pineapple, cherries, chopped apricots, watermelon rind, and lemon, orange or grapefruit peel. Use your candied fruit during the holidays in cookies and fruitcake, or dip in chocolate for your own homemade candies.
- Difficulty:
- Easy
Instructions
Things You'll Need
- sugars
- honey
- heavy saucepans
- candy thermometer
- fresh fruit
- Fresh Fruit
- Honey
- Sugars
- Candy Thermometer
- Heavy Saucepans
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1
Prepare fruit. Cut pineapple, apricots and watermelon rind into small pieces; chop cherries in half; remove white pith from lemon, orange or grapefruit peel and cut into strips or small pieces.
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2
Combine 1 cup sugar, 1 cup honey and 1-1/2 cups water in heavy saucepan.
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3
Boil over medium heat and cook, stirring constantly, until mixture reaches 235 degrees F on candy thermometer.
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4
Drop small amount of fruit into liquid.
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5
Cook on low heat 20-30 minutes until the fruit or rind is transparent.
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6
Drain and repeat with rest of fruit.
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7
Cool fruit and store in airtight container.
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1
Tips & Warnings
You can blanch citrus peels (dip them in boiling water for a few minutes) to make them less bitter.
If desired, you can dehydrate candied fruit by spreading thin layers on trays and drying for 12-18 hours at 120 degrees F until fruit is no longer sticky and the center has no moisture.
To sun dry, put trays in full sun for 1-2 days, stirring occasionally, until fruit is no longer sticky. Take trays in at night.
To oven dry, spread on trays and dry at 120 degrees F for 18-24 hours.
Store dried candied fruit in an airtight container.
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Comments
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Jennifer Scott Cole
Dec 07, 2009
I only use a small amount of candied fruit for my holiday baking. I already buy maraschino cherries for my holiday baking applications, so I thought that this might be a good set of guidelines for turning a cup or so of cherries into candied cherries. It worked beautifully using a mixture of sugar and the syrup the maraschinos are packed in. So easy! -
dagored
Mar 26, 2009
I have done this a thousand times. It works great.I would add to the list of applicable fruits kumquats and madarinquats for a non-traditional variations. They are perhaps the easiest fruits to candy by this process, being citrus fruits that have naturally sweet and having a totally eatable rinds even in their un-candied state. They're rinds are completely devoid of the bitterness the grapefruit and other bigger citrus rind often have (though you might want to de-seed them before you candy them. While they are eatable too, I don't particularly like the seeds once these fruits are candied).Also, the sweetener can be changed up in many combinations -- I haver used all honey, and all sugar, and I have often used granulated Splenda for Baking too, though I wouldn't use 100% Splenda because it gets a bit funky tasting all by itself in this application -- but to use it as half the sweetene
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jowi
Jan 08, 2009
Hello! On Step 6 where we're told to drain and repeat with the rest of the fruit, do we reuse the same liquid over again that the last fruit came out of?
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jowi
Jan 08, 2009
Hello! On Step 6 where we're told to drain and repeat with the rest of the fruit, do we reuse the same liquid over again that the last fruit came out of?
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PNW-PF
Jan 03, 2009
But WHY is the sugar required??? Our family includes a 44-yo adult and his 2 children who can eat honey but not the smallest amount of refined or raw, cane or beet sugar without their heart beats rising rapidly. Will the evaporation just take longer if i use honey (or maple syrup for nuts) only?
