Ingredient

Apricot

The apricot is the stone fruit most likely to let you down raw and most likely to reward you cooked. Its season is short, it travels badly, and it develops almost no additional sugar after picking — but heat concentrates it into something with far more character than a peach.

Why the fresh ones disappoint

Apricots are barely climacteric. They soften after picking and they generate aroma, but they gain very little sugar — much less than a peach or a plum. An apricot picked underripe stays sour and mealy for good.

They are also fragile and short-seasoned, which pushes growers to pick early. The result is the familiar British experience of a bowl of orange fruit that looks perfect and tastes of damp cotton wool.

A genuinely ripe apricot is deeply coloured, often with a red blush, soft to a gentle squeeze, and unmistakably fragrant. If you find them, buy all of them.

What heat does

This is the fruit where cooking is not a compromise.

• Roast them. Halved, stones out, cut side up, a little sugar and a splash of water, twenty minutes in a hot oven. Mediocre fruit becomes excellent.
• Poach in syrup with a vanilla pod or a strip of lemon. Gentle, and it rehydrates dry flesh.
• Apricot jam, which is the great classic use and works even with poor fruit, since sugar and boiling supply what the fruit lacked.
• In a tagine with lamb and warm spice, where the sourness matters more than the sweetness.
• Grilled alongside pork or chicken, where the caramelised edge is the point.
• As a glaze. Warmed, sieved apricot jam brushed over a tart is the standard patisserie finish, because it sets clear and tastes of very little.
• With almonds. Apricot and almond is not just tradition — the kernel inside the stone is closely related to a bitter almond and the affinity is real.

Fresh against dried

They are not substitutes for one another in any useful sense.

Fresh

Sharp, floral, low sugar by weight, high water. Best cooked. Short season, roughly June and July in Europe.

Dried, bright orange

Treated with sulphur dioxide to preserve the colour. Softer, sweeter, and the standard baking apricot. The sulphite is declared on the packet as an allergen.

Dried, dark brown

Untreated. Chewier, deeper, more caramelised, with a slightly sour edge. Better flavour and a worse appearance.

Hunza apricots

Small, wrinkled, sun-dried whole with the stone in. Intensely sweet and worth seeking out.

In cooking

Dried apricots hold shape and add sweetness to savoury dishes. Fresh ones collapse. Do not swap one for the other.

Getting the best out of a poor punnet

Assume the fruit needs help and it usually will not disappoint you.

1. Halve them along the natural seam and twist. Ripe apricots are freestone and the halves separate cleanly.
2. Taste one. If it is sharp and firm, roast; if it is soft but bland, poach; if it is mealy, make jam or chutney.
3. For roasting, sit the halves cut side up in a dish, scatter over a spoonful of sugar and add a splash of water to the dish rather than over the fruit.
4. Give them fifteen to twenty minutes in a hot oven until the edges colour and the juices bubble.
5. Let them cool in their own syrup. The flavour deepens noticeably as they sit.

Common questions