Fruit can add so much to a vegan diet, so it’s well worth your time to explore as many varieties as possible.
And it’s so versatile. You can snack on it, or bake it into pies, turnovers, and other desserts. Additionally, you can blend it into juice, top your cereal with it, or slice it into fruit salad. Every market sells a wide variety of fruit jams and preserves. No matter how you enjoy your fruit, it’ll provide a nice nutrition boost while offering uniquely delicious flavors. With so many kinds of fruit available, you always have something new to try. So let’s take a look at some possibilities that are too good to neglect.
Common Varieties of Fruit
The first thing you should know about fruits is that the varieties grown in colder climates are entirely different than what’s available in the tropics.
Temperate Fruits
Here are the most common fruits grown in temperate climates, listed in roughly the order they come into season:
- Strawberries
- Cherries
- Peaches, Plums, and Nectarines
- Raspberries and Blackberries
- Melons
- Blueberries
- Apples
- Pears
- Persimmons
Fruits rarely disappoint, but temperate tree fruit—especially peaches, nectarines, and apricots—is potentially sublime. Unfortunately, you’ll never be able to purchase the transcendent stuff at a supermarket, since it must be picked perfectly ripe. An outing to an orchard or farmers’ market offers your only chance to experience these fruits at their Platonic ideal. It’s always worth the trip. A summer without a bite of tree-ripe fruit is a summer wasted.
Additionally, you’ll never find sour cherries (often referred to as cooking cherries) at the supermarket. Their flesh is just too fragile to ship, but that same flesh makes them uniquely succulent. And their color has a psychedelic glow. You can pretty much only find sour cherries at u-pick orchards, and they’re well worth seeking out.
Tropical Fruits
Moving on, here are some of the most popular tropical fruits:
- Papayas
- Bananas
- Pineapples
- Avocados
- Mangoes
- Passionfruit
The above list only scratches the surface of what’s available, since several of the most delicious tropical fruits can’t withstand shipping and are rarely exported. These include starfruit, soursop, egg fruit, and jackfruit. What’s more, the bananas, pineapples, and mangoes available for purchase in the tropics are far tastier than the exported varieties.
If you adore fruit, the tropics are an incomparable place to live. Since the weather remains relatively constant near the equator regardless of the time of year, a wide variety of fruit never goes out of season.
A good mango has my vote as being the tastiest of all tropical fruits, but the deliciousness depends on the variety—of which there are dozens. Smaller oblong and thin-skinned orange or yellow mangoes like the Ataulfo are among the most consistently tasty. At all costs, avoid Tommy Atkins mangoes, which rank in tastiness right alongside the godawful Red Delicious apple.
Savory Fruits
While most tree-grown fruits are sweet, two notable and delicious exceptions are avocados and breadfruit.
Avocado trees thrive in warmer climates, and can be killed by just one hard frost. Avocados come in numerous varieties. Hass avocados are widely available and by far the tastiest widely-available variety. You can find avocados for sale in most developed countries, since Mexico exports them to every continent. If you find yourself consistently disappointed by the avocados you cut open, don’t miss my guide to selecting perfect avocados.
Breadfruit is widely grown in Hawaii and other Polynesian islands. It has a starchy bread-like flavor and texture, and is magnificent sliced and either roasted or sautéed with some garlic. Unfortunately, breadfruit bruises easily and rots quickly, so it’s rarely exported. In tropical regions, breadfruit often sells for practically nothing since each tree yields a massive amount of highly perishable fruit.
Nightshades
Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant are all nightshades—a family of savory fruits that grow on poisonous vines. Italian cooking relies heavily on nightshades. Farmers plant nightshades in the spring, as soon after the first frost as possible, and the vines die in autumn with the first frost. Every sort of nightshade is delicious when combined into an Italian sauce.
Eggplant is also a staple of Middle Eastern cooking, and is the key ingredient for a classic dish called baba ghanoush. When roasted traditionally in a wood-fired oven, the eggplant gains a smoky flavor and a wonderfully rich texture.
Purchasing Fruit
Smaller varieties of a given fruit or berry tend to have more complex and intense flavors. That goes for bananas, tomatoes, blueberries, and especially strawberries. Larger fruits may be more eye-catching, but they often lack flavor.
The first rule of buying fruit is to avoid the terrible mass-market varieties, specifically Red Delicious apples, Tommy Atkins mangoes, and Cavendish bananas—all of which are dreadful. Whenever possible, find out where your fruit was grown. Anything trucked in from thousands of kilometers away is generally lacking in flavor.
Ripeness is Key
You’ll often encounter gorgeous, flawless-looking fruits that are practically tasteless. When selecting fruit, the crucial skill is your ability to determine peak ripeness. Your nose often tells you more than your eyes. Since every fruit starts out as a flower, it’s no surprise that many fruits are naturally fragrant. For peaches and cantaloupes in particular, appearance can deceive, but smell tells you everything.
Other fruits, particularly cherries, are best judged by appearance. A plump, beautiful cherry invariably delivers one of the great flavors of late spring.
Know Your Seasons
You’ll get the most delicious and the cheapest fruit at peak season. Strawberries come to market in the spring. In late spring, cherries are the first tree fruit to ripen. By mid-summer, peaches, plums, and nectarines will flood into your farmers’ market, along with raspberries and blackberries.
Blueberries arrive as the summer days start to shorten. The further north they’re grown (or south, in the southern hemisphere), the later the blueberries ripen and the better they’ll taste. In late autumn, the fruit season closes with apples and persimmons. Persimmons might be the most delicious fruit of all—when perfectly ripe their flesh has a texture like pudding.
No fruit comes into season during the winter, but you can get freshly-picked pears, apples, and persimmons through late fall. Since apples can hold up well in cold storage for several months, they’re probably the best fresh fruit to eat over the winter. By the time spring rolls around, you should switch from apples to freshly-harvested spring produce.
If you’re in the tropics and have mountains nearby, you can have simultaneous access to the best of both worlds when it comes to fruit. You get the full assortment of tropical fruits from the lowlands, plus delicious temperate fruits from the chilly, higher elevations.
Frozen Fruits
Every supermarket and natural foods store sells inexpensive frozen fruit year-round. The most common varieties include peaches, strawberries, blueberries, and mangoes. All of these fruits are especially good when made into vegan smoothies. Just use the vegan milk of your choice—choose an unsweetened since your fruit will add plenty of natural sugars.
Frozen fruits can round out your diet in the winter. Nutritionally speaking, they’re a much better option than canned fruits, since they aren’t packed in sugar-sweetened syrup. Plus, since frozen fruits haven’t undergone the cooking that’s part of the canning practice, they come much closer to tasting freshly-picked.
You should consider washing, slicing, bagging, and freezing your own fruit during the peak-of-season. This will yield higher-quality frozen fruit than any commercially-made frozen brands.
When freezing, arrange your berries or sliced fruit in a single layer on a tray, then put into the freezer. The fruit will freeze hard in about an hour. Once that’s accomplished, transfer it to freezer bags. The food industry calls this method “individually quick frozen” (IQF), and it keeps your fruit from clumping together into an unappetizing frozen brick.
Dried Fruits
Fruits shrink during drying, which concentrates their flavors. No matter what kind of dried fruit you buy, check the label and try to avoid sulfites.
Raisins are the most popular dried fruit, and you have many other options. Nearly every fruit is wonderful dried. My favorite dried fruit is apricots, but not just any apricot. Specifically seek out Blenheim “slab” apricots. Dried apricots produced from this variety are unbelievably delicious.
If your yard has fruit trees, or you otherwise have access to an abundance of fresh fruit, why not consider purchasing a food dehydrator? That’ll enable you to feast on delicious dried fruit during the lean winter months. Dehydrators were once outrageously expensive, but you can now buy a good one for about the price of a rice cooker.
If you live in a temperate climate, you may find dried mangoes taste better than the fresh ones available locally, since dried mangoes were picked in the tropics at peak ripeness.
Figs and dates are two more exceptionally tasty dried fruits. Turkey, Greece, and other Mediterranean countries grow much of the world’s crop. Both these foods are commonly dried, especially for export. I think the most delicious varieties are Medjool dates and Calimyrna figs. In fact, I rank dried Calimyrna figs right up there alongside Blenheim apricots as the world’s most delectable dried fruit. However, avoid dried Black Mission figs, which compare poorly in flavor to other fig varieties.
Whatever type of dried fruit you buy, try chopping some up and adding it to your next batch of steel-cut oats or other hot cereal.
Some Cherry-Picked Advice
So, what’s the take-home message from this article? Buy local and at peak-of-season whenever possible. If not, both canned and dried fruit can be remarkably tasty. Frozen fruit is available year-round and is wonderful when made into smoothies. So go out of your way to sample unfamiliar fruits at every opportunity. Finally, avoid Red Delicious apples, Tommy Atkins mangoes, and Black Mission figs since these varieties are second-rate.
