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When crafting your winter menu, you might not consider how you can incorporate seasonal fruits. Menus tend to focus on entrées, and few entrées feature fruit. However, your clients will love trying these three seasonal winter fruits wherever you can use them on your menu, such as in drinks or desserts. Keep reading to learn about these delicious fruit options.
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Sweet Winter Pears
Pears provide a subtle but sweet flavor that many people don’t immediately consider when they think of the winter season. However, winter pears make delicious additions to everything from salads to desserts. These fruits taste great raw or cooked, which opens many menu opportunities for you.
Adventurous chefs can cook pears and add them to risottos, soups, and baked desserts. If you’d rather play it safe and let the pear flavor stand alone on your menu, you can add raw slices to salads or pair them with cheese for a sweet-salty appetizer.
Versatile Citrus Fruits
Citrus fruits are a surprising winter specialty, and they provide the vitamin D that many people lack during cold months. Adding them to your menu will help people feel healthier and give you the opportunity to experiment with sweet-sour combinations. For example, clementines and oranges are sweet citruses you can pair with ginger and mint.
Alternatively, you can combine sour citruses, such as lemon and grapefruit, with sweeter flavors, such as vanilla and coconut sugar. You can expect to see these flavor combinations and more as food trends in 2023, so get them on your winter menu as soon as you can.
Creating unique sweet-sour slushies will drive the sales of cold drinks during cold months. You can also use these flavor combinations in other dishes on your menu, such as orange and ginger cookies or grapefruit and coconut sugar yogurt parfaits.
Tart Pomegranates
If you want a fruit that creates a sweet-sour combination on its own, you can use tart pomegranates. These winter fruits have a short lifespan ending around the end of January, so you probably can’t use them all winter long. However, many people love this unique fruit, and you can incorporate it into everything from drinks to main entrée items.
Raw pomegranate juice is delicious if mixed with something slightly sweeter, and cooked pomegranate can add depth to meat or vegetarian dishes.
Pears, citrus fruits, and pomegranates are three seasonal winter fruits you can use on your menu in various ways. From helping you sell cold drinks to adding depth to entrées, these fruits will brighten your winter menu and help your clients expand their palates. There are other winter fruits you can also consider using on your menu, such as persimmons and kumquats, so there are many options to use to build an impressive winter menu.
