You probably buy fresh fruit, and you may love the sweet and chewy dried fruits—but do you ever buy freeze-dried fruit?
Unlike chewy dried cranberries and apricots, freeze-dried fruit is crisp and crunchy with an ultra-concentrated flavor. They are a great snack, but we love them for their baking and pastry super-powers.
With just a few minutes and a mesh strainer, you can turn easy-to-find bags of freeze-dried raspberries, blueberries, and mangos (to name just a few!) into vibrant dried fruit powders. You can add those powders to nearly any of your favorite recipes to add a concentrated burst of fresh, uncooked fruit flavor and color without the moisture of fresh fruit to get in the way of your finished product.
To make the powders, place a handful or two of your favorite freeze-dried fruit in a fine-mesh strainer set over a bowl. Using the back of a spoon or your fingers, crush the fruit and push them around the strainer until all you have left are seeds or any other solids. Discard the seeds, because the powder in the bowl is what you’re after.
Once you have your powder, you can add it to virtually anything you can think of. You can add it any dry ingredients, but stirring it into a finished batter or icing or kneading it into a finished dough will help you use the right amount for the dish.
Since you won’t need much to make a big impact, start with a little add a time and until the color and flavor are to your liking. The flavor will intensify as the finished product rests, so be conservative until you’ve gotten the hang of using the powders.
Though they can certainly be added to chocolate desserts, take advantage of the intense colors by adding fruit powders to vanilla-based recipes like marshmallows, sugar cookies, buttercream, and macarons.
For a treat that’s perfect for Valentine’s Day, or really any day, add a few tablespoons of raspberry powder to about half of a batch of sugar cookie dough. Gently knead the two doughs together a few times, just enough to incorporate them into one piece.
On a floured surface, roll the dough to create a marbled effect before using cutters to cut shapes from the dough.
You can create a similar marbleized surface by sprinkling a little powder on the surface of an iced cake before swirling it into the buttercream. The more you knead the dough or swirl the frosting, the more uniform your color will be, so once you get the right pattern, know when to walk away! Though, the worst that happens is you have a perfectly pink cake.
