Passion fruit makes these three recipes sing

Telegraph

14-02-2025

There are great highs in my job, though testing recipes at 3am is not one of them (I'm still scarred by last year's Christmas testing). The gift is that you can, from time to time, devote yourself to a single food. I feel a mixture of serenity and joy as I've been able to read about and cook with passion fruit for the past month. The passion fruit yo-yos below, filled with passion fruit buttercream, could have been made by angels – the biscuit component is what, in the UK, is known as a melting moment. If you decide to bake them, get a friend to hide them from you, or accept your fate.
The simple yo-yo illustrates passion fruit's greatest strength. Most fruits, except for lemons and limes, aren't intense enough to take on cream, meringue, pastry, cake and sugar. In fact, passion fruit saves fruits you wish had more acidity. It makes a classic strawberry Eton mess sing and energises peaches in a compote, and it does this without losing its power. Passion fruit posset? Passion fruit loaf cake? Hell, yeah. And don't even get me started on mango and passion fruit jelly.
You expect passion fruits to be sweeter than they are when you taste them for the first time. Before they're ripe they're as smooth as eggs, but with a slightly leathery purple skin. Watch for the wrinkles that appear as they ripen, but don't let this go too far as they become dry and the pulp shrinks. The fruit's interior is not what you expect either. Get the pulp and juice out with a teaspoon and look inside what feels like its 'shell'.
In some there's a delicate rim of mauve, orange and blue – a tiny rainbow – as if the most beautiful bird had hatched from it. The pulp makes you shudder. You wait a little before you go for a second slurp. Once you add sugar it doesn't lose this sharpness, or the indescribable flavour of the tropics.
There are different varieties but passion fruit – most commonly Passiflora edulis – comes from South America, specifically southern Brazil, Paraguay and northern Argentina. Now it's grown in other South American countries as well as Florida, Hawaii, California, Australia and New Zealand. It takes four kilos of fruit to produce one litre of juice, which means it's expensive.
Often, I've thought about giving a recipe for passion fruit sorbet, only to conclude that I can't ask cooks to shell out so much, so I blend the juice with mango purée. It's easier now that you can buy Funkin passion fruit purée (Ocado has it). That's expensive too, at £11.20, but comes in a one-kilo pack so you can portion and freeze it – it'll be there the next time you want a passion fruit hit. Marks & Spencer stocks 90g plastic packets of fresh pulp and seeds. I sometimes end up in such a frenzy of anticipation that I give up the search for my kitchen scissors and stab the packet with a sharp knife.
Its destination? Plain yoghurt sweetened with a little brown sugar. It's a solitary treat – passion fruit just for you. It's hard to believe that such a simple combination can be so good.
The pulp can also provide a layer of sharpness in the bottom of a crème brûlée, be spooned over rice pudding or be transformed, along with rhubarb, into an ice cream perfectly poised between sharpness and sweetness. I don't usually make savoury dishes with it, save for salads of mango and avocado, grilled langoustines and raw fish. The sea bass recipe here is great with raw scallops as well.
It is very good in a vinaigrette too, sweetened with a little honey. The cook must choreograph the dance between sweet and tart, finding the spot where they balance. Passion fruit is the food that makes your taste-buds go crazy and transports you to a place you've dreamt of but have never been.