A gardener shared how to use fruit that has become overripe to avoid having to throw it away.
It’s common for fruit to become a brown colour when it starts to mature with a mushy texture and not the nicest taste, including bananas, avocados and stone fruits, like plums and peaches. A lot of people’s first thought is to throw overripe fruit away, especially after seeing it become brown.
However, Joseph Clark, a gardening expert, shared a simple way you can use overripe fruit to turn it into ‘gummies’. Clark has built a reputation for sharing gardening tips, hacks and advice on social media where he has amassed 1.6 million followers on TikTok.
He is also the author of Garden To Save The World. In a recent TikTok video, the gardening-lover showed a ‘fun way’ you can make use of overripe fruit to stop it from going to waste and he advised you can use almost any fruit for this recipe apart from pineapple.
As Clark has been harvesting plenty of fresh strawberries at the moment, he decided to use these. He started by removing the green tops of the strawberries then putting them in a blender.
Then he added the juice of one whole lemon to roughly each pound (453.6 grams) of fruit and squeezed in four tablespoons of organic honey for some natural sweetness. Next Clark put in a “splash of water to help it all blend”.
After this he said to give this mixture a “really good blitz until it’s nice and smooth” before transferring it into a pan. The gardening fan then slowly brings it to a boil and adds in either gelatin or agar agar, a plant based equivalent.
He heats the mixture for a few more minutes until it has completely dissolved. His next step is to pipe it into silicone moulds while it’s still hot or old ice cube trays.
After around an hour of cooling in the fridge you will be left with some “delicious, natural fruit gummies which as they store will concentrate the flavour, making them even more tasty”.
In the caption of his TikTok post he shared that making a batch of 100 gummies only takes him about 10 minutes and he used agar agar as a setting agent which he found “amazing” but he noted it will “set much faster than gelatine” and be ready after about 20 minutes in the fridge, whereas gelatine “can take an hour or two”.
He further wrote: “Now I’m always being asked what I do with my harvests from the garden, and the simple answer is I usually give them away, but sometimes I like to play about with zero waste recipes, and these gummies are one of my favourites.Making these gummies is so easy, and it’s a brilliant way to use up old fruit, as that’s when its flavour is at its most powerful.
“They are great [a] great snack, and if you have children they work great in lunchboxes too.” Clark’s recipe has been well received by users in the comments section of the video as they said “great idea”, “looks good” and “yummy”.