Seven heavenly ideas to use up your fruit

Every year, UK households waste around 1.1 million tonnes of fruit. Around half of this is avoidable and could have been eaten. So we've shared seven heavenly ideas to use up your fruit and avoid food waste.

This is also a great guide to storing lots of different foods including fruit from Love Food Hate Waste. Don’t be too wedded to your fruit bowl, lots of fruit is best stored in the fridge (except bananas - although storing them in the fridge will stop them ripening if that’s what you need to do to make them last a couple more days).

Ideas to use up your fruit

Freeze it

When it comes to fruit your freezer is your friend. Soft fruits like blueberries, blackberries and raspberries freeze really well. Citrus fruit freezes brilliantly in slices – use them to flavour a glass of water or add them to cocktails. Apples, peaches, plums, kiwi can be frozen too. In fact, most fruit will be fine frozen, you can even freeze bananas. But the process can make fruit a bit soft so you need to think about how to use them. Frozen fruit makes great smoothies and milkshakes of course but will also make lovely sauces, jams, compote and crumble see below for recipe ideas. Another great idea is to juice your fruit and freeze it to add to smoothies, sauces, dressings, water, soft drinks and cocktails for an instant burst of flavour.

Blend it

Fruit past its best will blend beautifully into a smoothie or milkshake. Add a banana for substance and creamy sweetness and you can’t really go wrong!

Zest it

Don’t forget to use your citrus zest to add masses of flavour to your cooking, baking, salads or drinks. Zest a lime into a mixture of double cream, cream cheese and icing sugar and top a crushed biscuit base for a delicious and really quick cheesecase. Zest an orange over a salad for the taste of summer. Zest lemon into a gin and tonic - better than adding a slice!

Juice it

Not just to drink. Fruit juice makes a lovely addition to a salad dressing. Add lemon or orange juice to olive oil and white wine vinegar, season with salt and pepper. A salmon salad with fresh fennel and an orange salad dressing is a beautiful thing!

Jam it

Jam, compote or sauce - all variations of the same thing. Mix fruit with sugar and cook down. Serve with ice cream, stir through natural yoghurt, turn into a crumble, use as an accompaniment to a roast dinner or serve with cheese.

Bake with it

Where do we start?! Once you have a fruit compote you’re half way to a trifle, pavlova, cheesecake, crumble or a fruity sponge pudding.

Sweeten your salad

Pear and apple slices, grapes, kiwi, strawberries and raspberries are gorgeous in a salad, adding sweetness and texture. A goat’s cheese salad with pear, raspberries or both is delicious or try brie with grapes.

Let us know your top tips for using up fruit in the comments below!