Pâte de Fruits (Fruit Geleé Candies)

 

Pâte de Fruits (pronounced paht day fwee) are a classic French confection.  If you’ve ever had those Orange Slice candies, you’ve had Pâte de Fruits.  Granted, those Orange Slice things were hit & miss as a kid — sometimes you got a batch of tough ones and they were hard to choke down.  I am a fan of the Spice Drops (especially the black ones — fight me), which are also in the same vein as the pâte de fruits.

I’ve been after a good recipe to make “gummy” candy Edibles, but without all the gelatin.  Trust me, once you’ve seen how gelatin is made, you won’t be so keen on consuming it either!

This was one big science experiment, so I’ll break down my steps and hopefully you can make your own delicious fruit geleé candies.

First:  make Cannabis-infused sugar.  I wanted to make this vegan, so I used organic unrefined beet sugar.  I used the method from Sweet Mary Jane: 75 Delicious Cannabis-Infused High End Desserts, which involved buying a huge-ass bottle of Everclear.

Hey Sugar! Infusion:  7g high-potency KB marijuana, Everclear grain alcohol and 50g of sugar.

Decarb your marijuana.  Dump into a pint canning jar and just cover with Everclear.  Shake your booty the jar vigorously for 30 seconds every 5 minutes for 25 minutes.  Grab a pie plate and spray with pan spray.  Place sugar in pie plate and strain Everclear/cannabis concoction into the sugar.  It will not dissolve all the sugar, which is good.

Bake this ever so slowly at 225F for about an hour, stirring every 10 minutes.  When done, the sugar will be dry and ready to use.  7g of bud into 50g of sugar = super super strong.

I then measured out the Cannabis Sugar and filled in the rest with regular sugar and got on with my Fruity Frenchie Bites (I have GOT to come up with a better name!).

While my sugar was baking, I made my own fruit puree.  In the pastry world, fruit purees are just fruit and 20% sugar by weight.  So, if I need 1#8 oz of fruit, I would cook it down with 4.8oz of sugar, puree in a blender and then strain.  I used strawberries, since everyone seems to like them.  To me, the strawberry ends up tasting like jam bites (which I know some people dig), but I will try blueberry-raspberry or orange next time.

Here’s the recipe, adapted from CaramanFruit (a pureé company):

Yield:  about 150 1/2″ x 1/2″ pieces

Dosage:  about 10g THC per piece

500g strawberry puree

522g sugar (start with Cannabis sugar, measure out regular sugar to make up the rest)

13g pectin

100g glucose

8g Tartaric Acid dissolved in 8g water

If you’ve made jam, you can make this — very similar.  I did not have standard pectin, so I used Sure-Jell, which has dextrose as its first ingredient, pectin its last.  Going forward, I will increase the amount of pectin, because if the candies don’t set up, they are just blobs of goo, and you will be sad.

1. Whisk together the sugars and pectin.  Reserve.
2. Bring your puree to a simmer and then add the sugar/pectin.
3. Bring this to the boil and then add the glucose
4. Cook to 225F, stirring constantly.
5. Once you reach 225F, pull off the heat and add the tartaric acid solution
6. Put back on the heat and make sure the mixture reaches 226F
7. Pull off heat and pour into waiting 9×13 pan, lined with foil and greased
8. Allow to set up slightly and sprinkle exposed side in pan with sugar
9. Once completely set up (about 4 hours), turn out onto cutting board, sugar side down and cut into 1/2″ x 1/2″ squares.  Dredge pieces in sugar so they don’t stick together
10. Keep at room temp in tightly sealed container packed in sugar

Substitutions:  You can sub corn syrup for the glucose, but there is no sub for the Tartaric Acid.  Your bff Amazon can hook you up with some.

My taste testers report that these actually turned out stronger than 10mg per piece and there was a pronounced marijuana flavor with these.  I added in citric acid into the finishing sugar to give it a bit of a Sour Patch Kid flair.

When I worked with a bunch of Frenchies, they would come running for the Black Currant flavor (cassis), and I concur — it’s my favorite too.

Give this a whack and report back!  I had fun doing this and you will too.

{Edit} – Orange flavor was a total bust, and I blame the pectin.  So, Sure-Jell is out.  I now have really expensive marmalade.  Boo.

Second batch of Black Cherry Pâte de Fruits turned out GREAT, thank you industrial-strength pectin.  I used Louis Francois Pectin Jaune (yellow pectin) that is not thermo-reversible (it will not revert to goo if heated) and the Boiron recipe for pâte de fruits off their website.  Boiron is a French producer of fruit purees that are great.  Amazon can help you out and so can JBprince.com and pastrychef.com

 

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