The green and oblong feijoa berry loves a subtropical climate, therefore it is considered to be exotic. Her place of birth is South America, but today it grows in the Caucasus and in the southern regions of Russia.
Feijoa diameter does not exceed 7 centimeters, and weight - 120 grams. The ripe fruit is juicy and pleasantly sour. Feijoa is more beneficial to use completely, because the skin contains many useful substances.
Ripening berry from October to late autumn. During this period, you can enjoy the fresh fruits and make small blanks.
How to choose a feijoa for storage
To fully discover the taste of feijoa, you need to choose ripe berries. An immature fetus at room temperature will reach several days, but will significantly lose its usefulness. The most nutritious are feijoa, which have reached the tree.
When choosing berries you need to pay attention to the following features:
- Feijoa color. A ripe fruit has a dark green skin without individual bright spots. The surface of the berry is wrinkled and matte, and the flesh is transparent. If the inside of the fruit is brown, it is overripe. White flesh indicates that feijoa is still unripe.
- There should be no dark spots and brown veins on the skin. If they appeared, it means that feijoa has lain for too long and has already begun to deteriorate.
- Berries are not plucked from the tree, but picked from the ground. Ripened feijoa fall themselves. Therefore, you should not choose those fruits that have a stem. This means that they were cut in the undersized form.
Fresh Feijoa storage
Fresh fruits are stored for a relatively short time. After collecting, they do not lose their useful properties and visual appeal on average for ten days.
It should be noted that more than one day is spent on the delivery of berries, packing, waiting for the buyer. Therefore, store fresh feijoa at home for more than a week will not work.
After purchase, the fruit should be placed in the refrigerator and kept at the standard temperature for fruits and berries - two to three degrees below zero. Feijoa can be packed in a paper bag or a container with holes. Hermetic plastic bag is not suitable. Without air access, the berries will deteriorate faster.
Feijoa gradually lose moisture and become sweeter.
Immature fruits are stored as follows:
- In a room with good ventilation, paper is laid out on a table and berries are placed on it.
- The temperature should not fall below 22 degrees.
- Every day, every fruit must be checked in order to detect the beginning of decay in time.
Feijoa can sing at least a week. After that, they need to be stored in the refrigerator and stored as described above.
Live Jam - a way to save feijoa
Since feijoa can be stored for about a week, it is worth making jam from ripe berries. If you make it "alive", that is, do not cook the fruit, you get a product in which most of the useful substances remain. But the acidity, which is present in fresh feijoa, will not be.
You need to cook “live” jam in the following sequence:
- Clean fruit to grind with a blender or meat grinder.
- Put the mashed potatoes in a larger container, add sugar and mix. The amount of sugar depends on the degree of love for sweets. And also, the more of it, the more feijoa will last. On one kg of sugar berries add from 700 grams to 1, 5 kg.
- Periodically, the mixture should be stirred so that the crystals of the sweet ingredient are completely dissolved.
Ready jam should be placed in a clean glass container and closed.
Feijoa in this form will remain in the refrigerator for up to three months. Glass containers can be placed in the pantry. But the room should be dark, cool and dry.
Sugar can be replaced with honey, which is a good natural preservative. In this case, the taste of feijoa is perfectly complemented by nuts (except peanuts).
The color of the jam will gradually turn from green into brown. This is due to the action of the pigments secreted by the seeds.
Long storage of feijoa
Feijoa can neither be dried nor frozen. Therefore, it is possible to keep it as long as possible only by making jam.
Over-grown fruit for this is best not to use. Cooked with sugar, they can upset the digestive process.
Cooking jam is easy. The main thing is to keep the proportions: for one kilogram of berries it will take as much sugar and 0, 25 liters of water. The easiest way to cook is:
- The berries are ground in a blender or passed through a meat grinder.
- Sugar dissolves in boiling water.
- Mashed potatoes are shifted into syrup, stirred with a wooden spoon.
- The mixture after boiling is boiled for up to ten minutes. Appear foam needs to be removed.
- The finished sweet mass should be carefully poured into jars and tightened as usual.
Feijoa is stored in the form of jam for almost a year. Jars are placed in the pantry or refrigerator.
Feijoa is wise to buy in the ripening season. It is during this period that they are overflowing with useful components. To extend the shelf life of feijoa, you need to grind them with sugar or cook jam. Then a whole year before the new harvest you can enjoy yourself with the pleasant taste of exotic berries.
