When I figured out I had a quince tree in my yard, I was excited. I had never eaten quince before, so when
the time came to harvest the first quince I had become hyped up on descriptions of a heavenly flavor,
supposedly like the most fragrant apple you could imagine.
Reality was a bit of a letdown, however. I was fully prepared for the hardness of the thing – it was like a
rock, and I knew it would be, but what struck me was the smell. It smelled like…starfruit. My wife agreed
that the thing smelled like starfruit and, when we cut small pieces to try, tasted like a strange sour starfruit-apple hybrid. This is not a terrible thing in itself, and I even managed to eat several whole quince raw b
slicing them and eating them with cheese and crackers
So the taste was so-so, and being rock-hard it’s a very difficult fruit to eat. After eating a few raw I did not
feel like eating more, so I had to think of creative ways to store the stuff. Because, as those with quince
trees know, one quince tree will produce more quince than you could ever think of eating.
After eating them raw, I tried making quince sauce. It didn’t work out, at least not at first, due to the quince
having many small grainy bits in the fruit (kind of like a pear) that were not removed by a food mill. It also
didn’t taste very good, either. I thought quince was supposed to be better when cooked! I made about 20
pounds of quince sauce, of course, before I realized this and as such it ended up sitting in my freezer for
months.
Since at that point I didn’t really want to eat the stuff, my wife and I started using it as a filler in biscuits for
our dogs, which they seemed to like just fine. It probably introduced some fiber and minerals into their diet
and they didn’t mind the taste at all. It’s been a valued ingredient in our handmade dog cookies ever since.
It was getting late in the season, however, and the tree was still laden with more fruit than our dogs could
reasonably eat. Some was falling off and rotting, which I didn’t like to see. I gathered a bunch more fruit
and it sat on the counter for almost a week before I figured out what to do with it.
I like to drink smoothies, and the quince actually proved amenable to blending if added in small amounts.
The small grainy bits required extended blending, however, and sometimes persisted in the finished
product which made for unpleasant drinking. I found that freezing the quince in small chunks made th
texture a lot nicer, making diced frozen quince a decent smoothie fruit.
I remembered back, however, to that sauce I made, just sitting in the freezer. I’ve started adding a few
spoons to my smoothie every day, because it blends perfectly. I think the grains are weakened by cooking
and freezing and thus blend better. The taste is not strong, just sour, and it adds valuable acid and fiber t
the smoothie. I finally had stumbled on a way of incorporating my bumper crop of quince into my daily
diet, and I plan on consuming quince this way whenever I have fruit that I can make into sauce.
A lot of authors paint a picture of quince being a forgotten fruit, a secret treasure from the past only the
lucky few can enjoy. I’m not sure I agree. It’s not awful, by any means, but it is extremely easy to
understand why the apple and not the quince became a globe-trotting fruit superstar.
The apple is incredibly useful. It can be eaten straight off the tree, stored raw for months, juiced, fermented,
and cooked into sauce and pies. Unripe fruit even make a lovely verjus. The apple is a workhorse and there
are varieties for every possible use, coming in a constellation of colors and flavors.
The quince, by comparison, has not received as much love as the apple. It is as hard as granite, even when
ripe, and the flavor is not fantastic. It has limited use as a fresh fruit and seems like it would be difficult to
juice, although I would love to try. It doesn’t seem to have a high sugar content, though it might make an
interesting wine or cider if you could juice a ton of them. There are crabapple varieties that are much better
eating, so it is easy to understand why the quince has not been bred to the degree that the apple has.
My quince tree will stand, however, if only for novelty and roughage. The fruits can sell at markets for a
decent price to curious chefs, and most importantly the fiber-rich fruit can be cooked and pureed for use in
smoothies, muffins, and dog biscuits. It’s a pretty tree, anyhow, and has probably been standing since I was
a young child. Hopefully I can explore more of its uses, in juice or as cider, in the future.
Photo courtesy of Markus Spiske on Unsplash