Ingredient

Passion fruit

A passion fruit that looks past its best is exactly the one you want. The skin wrinkles and dimples as the fruit ripens and the interior concentrates, and a smooth glossy passion fruit is under-ripe and sharp. This single fact reverses most people's instinct at the shop.

Wrinkles, and why

Passion fruit ripens on the vine and drops, then continues to lose water through the skin. As it does, the shell shrinks and puckers while the pulp inside concentrates and sweetens.

A heavily wrinkled fruit therefore has more intense, less acidic pulp than a smooth one. Weight matters too: a light, hollow-feeling fruit has dried out too far and will have little in it.

The ideal is heavily dimpled but still heavy in the hand. If you have bought smooth ones, leave them out at room temperature for a few days and they will wrinkle.

The types

Purple passion fruit

The common one. Small, dark purple to almost black when ripe, sharply aromatic, quite acidic.

Yellow passion fruit

Larger, yellow-skinned, more acidic still, more common in the Americas. Often used for juice.

Sweet granadilla

Orange-skinned with a hard shell and grey-white pulp. Much sweeter and far less acidic, and eaten as a fruit rather than used as a flavouring.

Giant granadilla

Very large, green, with edible flesh as well as pulp. Rare outside the tropics.

The seeds

Edible, crunchy and slightly bitter. Straining them out removes a good deal of the texture and some of the character.

Getting everything out of one

A passion fruit yields very little, so waste matters.

1. Cut it in half around the equator rather than end to end. More of the pulp is accessible that way.
2. Scoop with a small teaspoon, scraping the membrane away from the shell — a lot of pulp clings to it.
3. To de-seed, warm the pulp gently for a minute to loosen it, then push through a sieve with the back of a spoon.
4. Keep some seeds back and stir them into the strained juice. The crunch is much of the pleasure.
5. Freeze surplus pulp in an ice-cube tray. It freezes perfectly and a cube is a useful unit.

What to do with the pulp

• Spooned straight over a pavlova, a panna cotta or thick yoghurt. The acidity is exactly what a rich, sweet thing needs.
• Passion fruit curd, made like lemon curd. Outstanding and better than the lemon version to many tastes.
• In a dressing for a fish or prawn salad, with oil, lime and chilli.
• Stirred into a cocktail or a soft drink, where the aroma does more than the sugar.
• In a mousse or a fool, where the acid keeps the cream from being heavy.
• Over a mango or pineapple salad, where it supplies the sharpness they lack.
• Reduced to a syrup with a little sugar, for pouring over ice cream.

Common questions