My parents are lucky enough to be able to grow passion fruit on their acre of land and when the fruit is ready for picking my mother goes through the process of scooping out the insides and freezing it for a later date. I wish they didn’t live a plane journey away.
I adore passion fruit and anything made from it, the intense fragrance and sharpness of this fruit is delicious. It has the tang of lemon but with added perfume. Passion fruit is not the most rewarding fruit when eating as is, because you don’t receive much from inside the hard brown reddish shell but with a few of them you can spread over some cream to sandwich meringues or make sorbet, or as here making a curd. This curd has a very intense flavour, you can use it to top a plain baked vanilla cheesecake or swirl it into the cheesecake. I made this curd with the intent of folding into some whipped cream to top a pavlova, my winter pavlova.
I was taught you had to wait for the passionfruit to be wrinkly because it was a sign of ripeness but that’s not quite true, smooth ones are ripe too and sometimes if they’re too wrinkly you might find they’re overripe. What to look for in a passionfruit is heaviness, the heavier the better and more likely to be full of juice and not to be disappointing ones where they’ve started to dry out and of no use.
I sieved out the seeds because they get hard like little bullets when the pulp is cooked and get stuck in your teeth. This curd is very simple and straight forward and adding the teaspoon of cornflour stops the custard from curdling if you overheat it, just whisk vigorously off the heat. The curd will keep for a few days in the fridge.
Passion Fruit Curd
The amount of sugar will depend how sour the passionfruit you have is, you can add more sugar to the curd as you’re making it and if you have made it too sweet add a little more lemon juice and it will balance it out.
8-12 passion fruits, pulp scooped out
2 eggs whisked lightly, just to break up the eggs
110g • 1 stick of butter (add a large pinch of salt)
150-200g • 1 1/4 – 1 1/2 cup of caster sugar (confectioner’s sugar)
1 teaspoon of cornflour
1/2 lemon juiced
Dissolve the cornflour in the lemon juice and set aside. Melt the sugar and butter in a pan over a low heat with the butter is melted add the the passionfruit pulp, beaten eggs and lemon juice mixture. With a balloon whisk keep stirring all the time. You can turn the heat up a little but just keep stirring and don’t let it boil, if by any chance you do remove the pan off the heat and keep stirring vigorously and the mixture will be fine.
This process will take a few minutes and the mixture will thicken to thick cream consistency it will thicken further when cooled down. Sieve the mixture into a bowl let it cool down and refrigerate until ready to use it. It will keep for a few days in the fridge.
