Ingredient

Grape

Almost every grape in a British shop is a table grape, bred for size, sweetness, seedlessness and a skin that survives shipping. Wine grapes are smaller, thicker-skinned, seedy and far more intensely flavoured. This is why a bunch of supermarket grapes tastes pleasant and vague, and why cooking with them is often disappointing.

Bred for the box

Table grape breeding has optimised for the qualities that survive a supply chain: large berries, thin edible skins, no seeds, high sugar, low acid and firm flesh. Flavour has been a secondary consideration, and the result is a fruit with a lot of sweetness and very little behind it.

Wine grapes concentrate sugar, acid and tannin in a much smaller berry with a much higher skin-to-flesh ratio. Almost all the aroma of a grape is in the skin, so a small thick-skinned grape tastes of much more.

The exception on a British shelf is the muscat family, which is bred for flavour rather than only for size. A ripe muscat grape tastes markedly of something — floral, honeyed, faintly grapey in the way grape flavouring pretends to be.

The ones worth choosing

Muscat

Green or amber, often seeded, intensely floral. The best-flavoured table grape and worth paying for.

Crimson and Flame

Red seedless, crisp, sweet, mild. The commonest supermarket red.

Thompson Seedless

Green, sweet, extremely mild. The commonest supermarket green and the source of most sultanas.

Concord

North American, deeply purple, slip-skinned, and the flavour of grape juice and jelly. Rare in Britain.

The bloom

The pale dusty film is a natural wax the fruit produces. It indicates unhandled fruit and should not be washed off until use.

Where grapes actually work in cooking

Sweetness alone is rarely useful. These are the uses where they add something.

• Roasted on the vine, which concentrates them dramatically and makes them worth eating. Excellent with sausages, pork or a soft cheese.
• With chicken or quail, in the French style, halved and warmed through in the pan juices at the end.
• In a salad with something bitter and something salty — chicory, walnuts, blue cheese, a sharp dressing.
• Verjuice. The pressed juice of unripe grapes, used as a gentler acid than vinegar or lemon. Worth knowing about and easy to make if you have a vine.
• Frozen whole, which is a genuinely good thing to do with a bunch going soft.
• In a schiacciata or focaccia, baked into bread with rosemary and coarse sugar, which is a Tuscan harvest dish.

Keeping a bunch alive

Grapes last far longer than most fruit if handled properly, and rot fast if not.

1. Leave them on the stem. Individual grapes pulled off have an open wound where the stalk was and spoil within a day.
2. Do not wash them until you are about to eat them. The bloom is a moisture barrier and washing removes it.
3. Store them in the fridge in a container with airflow, or in the perforated bag they came in.
4. Go through the bunch when you get home and snip out any soft, split or browning grapes with scissors. One rotting grape spreads.
5. Take them out twenty minutes before eating. Fridge-cold grapes taste of very little.

Common questions