David Berryman Ltd is well known as one of the UK's leading fruit processors, offering food and drink manufacturers a wide range of fruit preparations and sauces to meet any customer requirement.

As all of our fruit products are bespoke and created for some of the UK's biggest dairy and bakery manufactures, we can supply you with the exact fruit preparation you need for your food, drink or dairy recipe.

However, new entrepreneurs wanting to develop and launch their first product can often struggle to understand the difference between a fruit sauce or a fruit puree. They may not know what makes a compote or a confit. All these different terms can be confusing, but what is also crucial to learn is how including any of these fruit preparations in their recipe can affect the end result.

Fruit prep terminology explained

To help our new visitors to decipher some of these terms, here we will explain the difference between them so you can better understand how they will work in a new recipe formula.

It can also know the difference between these fruit preparations if you are swapping out some of the added sugar in your products for natural fruit alternatives.

Fruit compote vs confit vs sauce

Fruit compote is a dessert originating from 17th century France. It is made by taking fruit and lightly cooking it before packing it in sugar syrup. Fruit compote has a long and stable shelf life of up to two years. Compotes only use fruit as their base ingredient, apart from water and sugar.

Compote is a French term that means 'mixture', as it's a mix of fruit, water, sugar and other added flavours such as spices. Fruit compote is often served as a dessert on its own or served with another dessert, such as sponge pudding.

Fruit compotes are much more common than you think! Technically, all the tinned fruit you see on the supermarket shelf can be classified as a fruit compote.

Confit is usually used with meat. It involves a long and slow cooking method at a low temperature in fat. You may have heard of duck confit, where the duck is slowly poached in its own fat or has added duck fat added to the cooking pot to simmer the meat.

When it comes to sauces, many different types vary from savoury sauces such as parsley sauce that goes with fish to thick tomato sauce and even thicker jam-like sweet or savoury fruit sauces, such as cranberry sauce. Sauces may be thickened, compote and confit are not.

Fruit sauces tend to take longer to cook than other fruit preparations. This is because the fruit sauce needs to take on things such as thickening and emulsification, simmering to blend flavours together, and reduction in moisture to concentrate flavours.

Puree vs coulis

So here we have an interesting argument. Coulis is a term that you hear bandied about a lot in the restaurant industry, but isn't that just a posh term for fruit puree?

While fruit compote can be thought of as being similar to fruit coulis, a coulis is usually cooked for a while longer to make the fruit very soft. The mixture is then pressed through a strainer to make a smooth puree or paste.

Puree is a general term applied to cooked food, such as fruit, vegetables or legumes, processed into a soft and creamy smooth paste or thick liquid. In most cases, a puree intended for use as a food ingredient is called a paste but will be called a puree if it is to be served as food in its own right.

For example, you may want to make a new ice cream or yoghurt that has a swirl of fruit puree going through it. The fruit puree is there as a feature of the product and is a selling point. But you may want to produce a new range of fruit-flavoured muffins that uses a mixed fruit paste as a base ingredient and will not be a selling feature for the range.

Find out how you can develop your own fruit sauce recipe with our help.

How your fruit prep choice affects your product

Whichever type of fruit sauce you use will have an impact on the final results of your recipe. Injecting a doughnut with a fruit puree may result in the doughnut becoming soggy because of the soft, wet nature of the puree.

However, when a thicker fruit sauce or smooth jam with no fruit chunks is used inside the doughnut instead, the sauce will do a better job because of its thicker consistency and much-reduced water content.

Fruit sauces are the only type of fruit prep that is thickened with something on purpose. Many fruit sauces used in the food and dairy industry is thickened to give them a more viscous consistency. Thickening ingredients added to fruit sauces can include cornstarch, flour or Xanthan gum, or something similar.

Fruit prep shelf stability

When using any type of fruit preparation in your food, drink or dairy product recipe, you will need to know that your fruit ingredients will have good shelf stability and keep well.

Professionally made fruit preparations from David Berryman Ltd are suitable for long term storage when kept in proper conditions. You should keep our fruit preparations in cool, dry and dark conditions.

We carefully package our fruit preparations in hermetically sealed product packaging to ensure no oxidation takes place. You can talk to our technical team about our product packaging options to determine which type of packaging would best suit your needs.

If you need help with your recipe for your first product, we even offer our expert help from our blending and compounding team with your recipe development.