What to CookFruit
How to Make Flavored Marshmallows for All Your Summer S'mores
by Alice Medrich
• June 20, 2016
• 8 Comments
Strawberry marshmallows? You might surmise that the best way to make them would be to cook fresh berries or their juice to a concentrate and use the reduction to flavor the marshmallows. While that is very smart thinking, your marshmallows will taste more like strawberry jam than fresh strawberries and you will have done more work than necessary!
Chocolatiers and pastry chefs often use freeze-dried fruit powders as a source of pure, concentrated, fresh fruit flavor without artificial color or flavor. The powders are simply pulverized freeze-dried fruit (or vegetables, for that matter), which you can find in small packages in many supermarkets. If you crush the fruit pieces in a mortar or toss them into a food processor, you get fruit powder. (You can also buy the powder online.) (Note that dehydrated fruits—like the ones you'd snack on while hiking—won't work for this, since they aren't dry enough!)
Marshmallows made with freeze-dried fruit powder have the flavor and aroma of fresh berries. They are unusual and compelling enough to serve just as they are. But you could also dip them in chocolate, or make s'mores with them—perhaps with a layer of peanut butter? How about a parfait of marshmallows, whipped cream, and fresh berries? If you laced the whole thing with a little strawberry jam, you would get a triple strawberry flavor effect.
You could fill sandwich cookies, or reinvent rocky road ice cream by folding them into vanilla or strawberry ice cream with toasted almonds or roasted peanuts and homemade chocolate chunks. And imagine making the marshmallows with other fruit or even vegetable powders—I know you’re thinking about carrot marshmallows…
- 1/4 cup (28g) cornstarch
- 1/4 cup powdered sugar
- 1 large egg white (30 grams)
- 1/4 cup water
- 7 grams (1 envelope) gelatin (I used Knox)
- 3/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon (165 g) granulated sugar
- 2 1/2 tablespoons (50g) corn syrup
- 1/2 cup water
- 1/8 teaspoon salt
- 3/4 cup (15g) freeze-dried strawberry slices, pulverized in a mortar or mini food processor and kept in a covered container until needed
Alice Medrich is a Berkeley, California-based pastry chef, chocolatier, and cookbook author. You can read more about what she's up to here.
Have you cooked with powdered fruit? What do you do with it? Share your ideas in the comments.
Comments (8)
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To make chocolate marshmallows, would you use cocoa powder in place of the freeze-dried fruit powder?
Is it possible to make this Vegetarian? I have tried to use a vegetarian gelatin before and it doesn't ever SET the proper way.
Would love to make these, but is there a substitute for the corn syrup, because...ick! I never use it.
Alice is a James Beard Foundation and IACP award-winning author of ten cookbooks, including her latest, Flavor Flours.
Please don't confuse regular dried fruit with freeze dried fruit. They are not the same and will not produce the same results or the same flavor of fresh fruit.
Would regular dehydrated strawberry work or is there a specific benifit by it being freezer dried?
Regular dehydrated would work, too! As long as you can grind it into a powder, it should work.
I agree that dehydrated should work, but freeze dried will be much easier to grind and have a fresher taste, at least in my experience.
Hi Ebony—I think I misunderstood your question! (My apologies! I hope I haven't mislead you.) I'd stick to freeze-dried—they're the only ones that will turn into a proper powder (thus making the marshmallows consistently pink and fruity without changing the texture).
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