Fruit Sludge

My revolutionary new way of suspending fresh fruit in cooked rhubarb.

Hi.

Did you know that some of your favorite food Substackers / influencers / social media icons strategize about the recipes that they share with you? Some of them have teams and assistants and they sit around a table every Monday and say things like: “I feel like we need a summer cocktail?” And somebody else says, “Oh my God, Jessica, that’s such a good idea.”

I guarantee you not one of them has ever said: “Hey, what about fruit sludge?!”

Fruit Sludge is a concept I came up with last week when I had a bunch of rhubarb in my fridge and a bunch of fresh fruit — apricots, strawberries, blueberries — that didn’t have long to live on my counter.

I didn’t feel like cooking the rhubarb with sugar, so I cut it into small pieces and added about 1/4 cup of honey. I cranked up the heat and let it cook until the liquid came out and the rhubarb softened into a kind of goo. Then I added all of the chopped-up fresh fruit:

I did this off the heat because the goal here wasn’t to cook everything down: it was to preserve the fresh fruit feeling inside the gelatinous rhubarb — sort of like fruit that bobs around in Jell-O, except fresher and more tart.

Sure, it’s not going to win a beauty pageant and may get you kicked out of cooking school

But the next morning? When you have your yogurt and granola? You can’t do much better than adding some Fruit Sludge™.

The key here is that it keeps the fruit fresh all week in its rhubarb-y suspension. How do I know this? Because I just had Monday’s Fruit Sludge for breakfast and it’s Friday. And it still tasted like the fruit was just plucked from a tree. Or a bush, as the case may be.

So the next time you have peaches or nectarines or plums or berries starting to turn, don’t throw them into the compost. Make Fruit Sludge! It’s Nature’s Fruitsaver. (Still working on the tagline. Get on that, Jessica.)