Candied fruit can be a delicious sweet treat, a colourful decoration for a dessert such as a Christmas cake, and a healthy snack if you’ve got a sweet tooth and are trying to distance yourself from chocolate. Fruit is full of vitamins and nutrients so we should be getting as much as possible into our diets, but fruit doesn’t always last long, so if you do a weekly shop, you may find your apples have bruised and your bananas are brown by the end of the week. Candied fruit, on the other hand, is preserved in sugar so the fruit lasts longer and you can enjoy snacking on it for longer.
So how long does candied fruit last? Let’s have a look at exactly what candied fruit is and why it’s healthier than you may think!
Although we don’t use the term candy for sweets much in the UK, the process of candying refers to coating something in sugar and turning it into a sweet treat. To make candied fruit, you simply choose whichever type of fruit you wish to preserve and cut it into small pieces or slices.
Some fruits you can candy include:
Lemons
Oranges
Cherries
Cranberries
Strawberries
Pineapples
Ginger
Soak all of the fresh fruit slices in sugar syrup in a container and gently heat so that the sugar syrup replaces the water content of the fruit. You’ll see that the fruit slices shrink slightly and become thinner as the water content is lost. When finished, let your candied fruit cool off and harden slightly and it’s ready to eat.
You can also candy lemon and orange peel to get more of the vitamins and a boost of antioxidants in a more delicious way. But you can candy more or less any fruit, so whatever you fancy, take a look in a health foods shop or try your hand at candying fruit yourself at home. If you use candied fruits for decorations, the more colourful the better!
When you buy candied fruit at a health foods shop, it will have a ‘best before’ date on the packet which you should stick to to get the best out of your fruit. However, in most cases, candied fruit will last up to 2 years.
A ‘best before’ date will show you how long before your candied fruit loses its flavour and the texture changes, which can be a year for some fruits. But if the label says ‘use by’, you shouldn’t eat the food product after this date.
Candied fruit is made in the same way in a shop as it is at home, although on a much larger scale. So if you make candied fruit yourself, you can be sure it will last 1 to 2 years. To avoid any risks, after 1 year, check if the candied fruit has the same appearance, smells good and tastes good before eating too much.
If you haven’t candied it enough and there’s still water content in the fruit, the fruit may ferment and go off. In small quantities, this won’t make you very ill, but you should avoid eating off fruit, which should be obvious from the smell and appearance of the candied fruit slices.
Over at least the last millennia, humans have found ingenious ways of preserving foods so that we can keep our diets healthy all year round. From making cheese to coating foods in oil, salt and sugar, there are plenty of ways to preserve fresh food products.
When the fruit is candied, the water content that would normally stagnate and cause the fruit to ferment or become rancid as bacteria and mould react with it, is replaced with liquid sugar, so the sugar can coat the whole fruit and naturally preserve it so you can keep up your vitamin intake even in the depths of winter.
However, that doesn’t mean that you can leave your candied fruit out on the kitchen counter to no effect; ants and other small bugs love sugar and will be attracted to it, and any moisture in the air may contaminate the candied fruit, affecting its shelf life. So it’s important to store your candied fruit well too.
If you buy a packet of candied or glace fruit in a shop and open the packet, or simply make some yourself, you should then store the fruit in an air-tight container to prevent air or moisture from getting into the fruit.
You should never freeze candied fruit as the water content will change drastically which will affect the texture and the shelf life of the candied fruit. You should also store it in a cool dry place, as per packet instructions, so the heat from the sun or the humidity in a room won’t affect the candied fruit.
You may wonder if candied fruit is healthy because clearly, too much sugar in our diet is bad for our health as well as our teeth. But candied fruit is still fruit so can something be healthy and unhealthy at once?
In short, the government recommends adults should not eat more than 30g of free sugars (added sugar) each day, so a small handful of candied fruit is perfectly ok. To put it in context, a can of cola has 39 grams of sugar, and a Mars bar contains 31 grams of sugar. So if your go-to snack while working, after exercising or as a dessert is a sugary or chocolatey one, you can consider replacing it with candied fruit for a healthier alternative.
Sugars found naturally in foods like fruit are not free sugars and don’t need to be cut down on, so you can eat fruit without concern for the sugar content. But bear in mind that this is still included in the health information on a packet of candied fruit, as well as the added sugars in the syrup.
One statistic bandied around is that a glass of fruit juice has as much sugar as a glass of a sugary fizzy drink like cola. But while this may be true, it denies the fact that orange juice is full of vitamin C and other important nutrients, as well as the sugar content being fructose, while cola has no nutritional value and is largely made of free sugars such as in corn syrup.
The same comparison can, therefore, be made with candied fruit. Yes, it contains sugar, however, it also contains a number of vitamins and antioxidants, making it a far healthier alternative to a manufactured sugary snack. So, if you’re looking for cake toppings, put the pure sugar hundreds and thousands and chocolate chips aside, and opt for the colourful and much healthier options of candied fruit!
Candied fruit makes for a great snack when you’re looking for a sugary treat, but there are plenty of other uses for candied fruits, including:
Cake decorations
Fruit cake filling
Mince pie filling
Sweet snack
Fruit makes for a great filling in cakes, especially traditional wedding cakes and Christmas cakes, but due to the water content, it can be hard to use fresh fruit in a sponge cake without making the mixture too wet and soggy. That’s why candied fruits and candied peel are ideal to shop up small and add to your cake mixture for a tasty and healthy filling.
At Natural Health 4 Life, we believe that healthy foods don’t have to be bland. That’s why we have a large range of candied fruits available on our online store ready for delivery across the UK, so you can have a healthy snack on hand whenever you want one.
Choose from:
Lemon peel
Amerena cherries
Orange and Lemon slices
Whole mixed fruits
Whole angelica
Red and green cherries
Stem ginger pieces in syrup
And much much more from our shop today!
