Fresh fruit sauces are simple to make and add elegance, color, and delicious aroma to desserts. They are the perfect—even magical—approach to dessert for the insulin resistant. Because they include the whole fruit, there’s plenty of fiber to slow down absorption! And just about any fruit can be blended into a rich vitamin-filled sauce.

For instance, fresh raspberries and blackberries are scrumptious floating in a creamy pineapple sauce. Or drizzle strawberry sauce over plain Greek yogurt. Oh my. Fruit sauces add true sparkle to baked fruit, pies, pancakes, and fruit-sweetened ice cream and sherbet.

Along with this sales pitch, I offer four helpful hints to making successful fruit sauces:

1. Skip the bargain basket when choosing fruit. The most flavorful sauces always come from good-quality ripe fruit.
2. Wash fruit thoroughly before removing the skin, core or pit. Chop and whip in a food processor or blender until smooth.
3. Flavor sauces with a sprinkle of spice or juice. Nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger add a special zing. Apple, pineapple, banana, and pear especially perk up with a dash of spice. And papaya, guava, and mango just love a splash of lime juice.
4. Use as soon after blending as possible—this is when the sauces are at their flavor- and texture-peak.

And the beauty of a fruit sauce is that many do not even need cooking—just whip them in a food processor or blender and immediately add to your dessert. Apples, bananas, blueberries, cherries, mangos, papayas, peaches, pears, pineapples, plums, and strawberries all make delicious fresh “instant” fruit sauces.

Then there’s fruit puddings. They stand alone as a light, healthy, and delectable dessert as well as an excellent filling for cream pies and puff pastry. And any fruit sauce can be transformed into a rich and thick pudding.

Just combine your sauce (blended fruit) with a thickening agent. Try arrowroot (a fine white powder with no noticeable flavor of its own), cornstarch (another fine white powder with little to any noticeable flavor of its own), and flour (a convenient and easy-to-use thickener, but it tends to add its own flavor when used in substantial amounts).

TIP: When using arrowroot or cornstarch to thicken, substitute half as much as you would flour.

And here’s a bonus: All the fruits mentioned above, plus guava, make excellent sugar-free puddings.

Before I close with one of our family favorite recipes (that we’ve used in pies, cobblers, over ice cream, and frozen as popsicles), I’ll just suggest that you might want to get in the habit of pureeing fruit and freezing this in ice cube trays, and store the frozen cubes in labeled freezer containers or plastic bags. Then, when you need a fruit sauce or want to make a pudding jiffy-quick, just pop a few out and let thaw. Such a time-saver!

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    Alice Osborne
    Weekly Newsletter Contributor since 2006
    Email the author! alice@dvo.com