Buying fresh fruit?

Purchasing fresh fruit is an extremely important part of homemakers and housekeepers weekly chores. The importance of this function is all geared towards providing your family with healthy and nutritious food to eat, and what can be more important than fresh fruit? This is why it’s imperative when buying it you make the right choices.

The information below will guide you through all the techniques in order for you to get the best out of your weekly fresh food shopping trip; so browse at your leisure.

One of the best fresh food shopping tips I can give you in this situation is to learn how to recogonise when certain fruits have reached their optimum level in terms of it’s ripeness and therefore it’s taste and texture. Usually the best way to determine whether or not the fruit has reached its peak is by using the senses of touch and smell as well as looking at the colour and size of it.

As with many things certain fruits lend themselves to this method of detection more than others. Fruits which come into their own here are peaches, strawberries, pineapples, nectarines, melons and plums, therefore next time you visit your local supermarket or green grocers then make sure your nasal passages are clear.

In addition to the above fresh food tips, touch can be used to check out the texture of the piece of fruit you are handling. Fruits which are suited to this process to determine their freshness are kiwi fruit, mangoes, guavas and papayas.

When you handle these, give them a little squeeze; if the fruit is hard and won’t give then it hasn’t quite reached maturity, conversely if you follow the same procedure and the fruit is very squashy then it has very much surpassed maturity and shouldn’t be purchased. However, when the fruit gives slightly when squeezed then is perfect and should be purchased.

Supermarket these days have cottoned on to the idea that consumers don’t necessarily consume fruit as soon as they’ve purchased it, for example if shopping is undertaken on a weekly basis or even every two weeks then by the end of that particular period the fruit which was bought in the weekly shop wouldn’t be so ripe. In order to cater for these people the supermarkets have started to stock fruit which is labeled as ‘ripening fruit’ or words to that effect, this label is basically telling the consumer that if they purchase this particular fruit they can leave it a good few days before it reaches it’s peak. This may seem like a novel idea, but what often happens is that these fruits, such as plums are sold in covered packs, therefore it makes it difficult to determine where they are on the ripeness scale. In this situation it is a good idea not just to place the fruit straight into your shopping basket - thus discarding all the fresh food tips above – instead try to look at the fruit or smell it to determine it’s freshness. This needs to done because although it has been intimated that that the fruit will ripen further after you’ve purchased it, it can be difficult to say how long they’ve been on the shelf , unless it is dated.

Another ploy which supermarkets and green grocers use in order to make their fruit more appealing to the consumer is to use a process called waxing. Waxing fruits, such as lemons, limes, oranges, tangerines, Clementine, apples, grapefruit, kumquat and pears gives them a nice shiny complexion which obviously improves their appearance which in some cases can vastly exaggerate the freshness of the fruit in question, therefore care must be taken when purchasing these especially if you plan to use the peel in cooking as the wax will more than likely taint the flavouring of your meal.