I will share with you some of the lessons from a summer full of passion fruit.

Passion fruit imparts a wonderful floral exotic sweet tartness to a dish or beverage, and people would probably eat them more often, if there were not so many seeds. Here I show how to remove the fruit from the seeds.

Unfortunately, the memory on my device became full and cut off my video, so I had to do a part 2. I am still learning how to hold my tablet when I take a video, so sorry for the rough footage.

My vine was young in the previous years and this year it just took off and produced so much fruit. Initially, I did just eat the fruit in fruit salads, but after getting so much fruit, I needed a method of processing a lot of fruit at once.

Passion fruit made easy, part 1

[www.youtube.com]

Passion fruit made easy, part 2

[www.youtube.com]

Summary of my technique is as follows:

Mash passion fruit through a wide screen stainless steel sieve with a fork. My experience is that I get 1:1 ratio of juice and pulp. The pulp is mainly seeds with some fruit still attached and the seeds are still covered with some passion fruit.

I refrigerate the separated juice and add to sweet juices, like watermelon.

I take seeds with pulp and blend in food processor with watermelon juice. In the video I used 2 cups pulp with 1 cup watermelon juice. I blend till seeds are freed from all pulp (maybe 10 seconds). I strain. I repeat 3 more times with fresh watermelon juice each time. By the fourth time, the seeds are completely cleaned and washed and there is no passion fruit left on seeds.

The watermelon juice has turned into a puree from all the passion fruit removed from the seeds.

The result is that the passion fruit has been fully removed from seeds and there is no waste.

One drink I made yesterday and today is watermelon juice, passion fruit juice and the tarter valencia orange juice. Delightful.

My efforts so far in blending passion fruit in the vitamix have not been good, because the seeds make the blend gritty.

Juicing has been a strain on the juicer with the seeds.

Using the food processor was the last attempt, and it was fantastic.

My first video had rough footage because I was holding the camera while I did it, so I redid it with fresh passion fruit. No need to watch this unless you have a lot of passion fruit to process. TSM told me that one passion fruit is $2 in Australia where he lives. But passion fruit vines are tenacious and it's easy to be overwhelmed by a lot of fruit.

Passion fruit made easy, more complete and wide angle

[www.youtube.com]

I measured everything this time. There was 2.25 lbs of peels, almost 11 ounces of juice and about 11 ounces of pulp with seeds, so it was again a 1:1 ratio of pulp to juice.

This time I had to blend the seeds 6 times with watermelon juice to get them free of the passion fruit pulp.

My one last comment is that the juice is very stable in the refrigerator for a few days, if you can't finish it all at once. It's the most stable fruit juice I ever tried.

Thanks Tai.

I use a nylon mesh bag to strain many things. It works alot better than a simple strainer because you can squeeze it hard - a good workout for hand strength.

[www.amazon.com]

Hey Brome, for sure that would work to get the juice out. And that is step one of a two step process of fully extracting the passion fruit from the seeds.

But you will still have the pulp clinging to the seeds and that's where my technique of using the food processor comes in handy.

I made a mistake and said the techique is only worthwhile if you have a lot of passion fruit. that's not true. It's a good technique, even if you have only 2-3 passion fruit, because food processors come in all sizes, including really small ones.

Also, the wide screen sieve is useful once you are trying to separate the pulp from the seeds. the finer the mesh, the longer it will take.

The nylon nut milk bags are good for non-gritty milks and juices, whereas in my technique, I am trying to extract all possible pulp minus the seeds.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/08/2015 08:09PM by Tai.

Here's a tip that will get the job done in a jiffy without all that mess to clean up - use your Welles Press.