I made seven flavors of pâtes de fruits for the holidays: Morello cherry, guava, pineapple, Williams pear, blood orange, passion fruit, and cassis. All made with Ravifruit purees except for the Cassis, which was Boiron. I used the old version of the Boiron formulas, scaled to fit my 12x12 removable bottom cake pans. Although they all turned out well (good texture, everybody loved them), I was disappointed in the flavor of the passion fruit and blood orange ones.
Some back story before I get to my actual question:
In years past, I've ordered my purees from Perfect Puree of Napa Valley. Every puree I've had from them has been great (except maybe the carmelized pineapple, which is a little... odd). I especially love their concentrated passion fruit and blood orange purees for delicious, intensely flavored PdFs. My sole complaint about Perfect Puree over the years has been their ridiculously astronomical shipping costs. This year I decided I'd had enough aggravation about that for one lifetime and so I chose to order purees from l'Epicerie instead.
[EDITED TO ADD: Wait... did I say l'Epicerie??? Sheesh. I must have been really tired when I wrote this post. 😂 I don't think l'Epicerie even sells fruit purees! (Although they do have a lot of other great stuff, and are my usual source for PdF pectin). Anyway, I ordered these frozen fruit purees from Gourmet Foodstore. Which has a great selection, reasonable shipping prices, and prompt delivery, as I stated below. I will definitely be ordering from them again. Sorry for the error.]
Quality products, shipped fast at a reasonable cost—I'm a happy l'Epicerie Gourmet Foodstore customer. I knew Boiron made a concentrated blood orange puree and that's what I planned to order. Unfortunately it was out of stock so I opted for Ravifruit's unconcentrated one and proceeded to improvise. In their formula for blood orange PdF (which uses a pear "basis puree"), Boiron has a footnote recommending that 10% of the blood orange puree called for in the recipe be in the form of concentrate. My scaled down version of the formula called for 580g of blood orange puree. 10% of that weight is (roughly) 60g, so I weighed out 520g of the unconcentrated puree to use as is, and then "made" a concentrate by reducing 180g of the unconcentrated puree to 60g. I did this in the microwave with the intention that the reduction would taste less "cooked." The end result was that my concentrated puree tasted... okay. Not terrible, certainly more intense than the unconcentrated puree, but definitely not the bright, tart/sweet, intensely fruity flavor of Perfect Puree's blood orange concentrate. With a much duller color.
The blood orange PdFs I made with it were also... okay. Pleasant enough, identifiably orange-y, but with no real "punch," so pretty boring. The question is: in the absence of the Boiron (or some other commercially prepared) concentrate), is there anything I could have done differently to achieve a better outcome? Would it have worked to use 100% blood orange puree instead of using the basis puree? I suppose it's idle speculation at this point since I simply won't do it again without a proper concentrate available, but I'm curious nonetheless.
In the meantime, here's a gratuitous photo of my 6-year-old granddaughter who loves nothing better than to help me pack pâtes de fruits and wrap caramels, and is very serious about having scrupulously clean hands when she does so.
