Hi! I'm wanting to get advice on the best brands of fruit purees and best places to order them. Any advice greatly appreciated
updated by @krista2: 04/09/15 20:30:41

The best purees are the ones you make yourself out of fresh fruit. It's very easy - almost criminal to buy some if you have the fruit readily accessible.

Having said that, Qzina Specialty Foods has many types of great frozen purees. www.qzina.com

Cheers

Brad

As far as I can tell from the Qzina website, they sell only Sicoly pures. For a long time, Boiron was the brand everybody spoke of, practically the standard, but I have noticed of late that many suppliers have been switching to other brands. L'Epicerie in New York switched to Ponthier a year or so ago, gourmetfoodworld.com carries Ravifruit, markys.com still sells Boiron, and perfectpuree.com (of California) sells its own product.

The only brand I've used so far is boiron and I really liked the flavor of the passion fruit but the morello cherry has too much sugar added. It's excessively sweet to my taste. The passion fruit was extremely runny like juice so I had to reduce it a lot. Just wondering how it rates compared to others since this is all I've tried as far as premade. Passion fruit would be pretty hard to come by here fresh, and when I can get it it's pretty spendy. I'm curious what brands are considered best/worst quality.

Krista:

One reason to use purees over making your own is consistency. The large producers have the expertise and equipment to make products with consistent flavor from batch to batch and year to year. That's hard to do of you're buying or growing your own fruit and making small batches. That said, making your own, when the fruit is handy, gives you control you don't have when you buy a puree.

In my experience, I tend to like some flavors from one vendor and other flavors from others. If I were to get into business making fruit-flavored confections I would probably source from multiple providers even though it makes buying more challenging.

One thing to consider, especially for fruits like passion fruit and guanabana is that there are several brands that are very inexpensive that you can find in the frozen section of supermarkets that cater to the Hispanic community or that are in Hispanic neighborhoods. Often these are unsweetened and they tend to be very cheap compared with fancier imports. They may or may not be to your taste but for a couple of bucks per flavor it's not expensive to experiment.

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clay - http://www.thechocolatelife.com/clay/

Thank you for the advice! I'll have to look into that