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HI. I have a Medlar tree that is fruiting for the first time. I've read you can eat the fruit but they have to be picked and left sweat for a while. I've heard you can also make jam but I can't find a recipe. I'd like to know have any members used the fruit and if so, how?
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I just found this. Hope it's useful to you....
Ripe medlars, for example, are taken from the tree and spread on some type of absorptive material (such as straw, sawdust, or bran) somewhere cool, and allowed to decay for several weeks. In Trees and Shrubs, botanist F. A. Bush wrote about medlars that "if the fruit is wanted it should be left on the tree until late October and stored until it appears in the first stages of decay; then it is ready for eating. More often the fruit is used for making jelly."[2] Ideally, the fruit should be harvested from the tree immediately following a hard frost, which jump starts the bletting process by breaking down cell walls and speeding decay.
Chemically speaking, bletting brings about an increase in sugars and a decrease in acids and tannins (tannins cause the unripe fruit to be puckery). In some cases, bletting is simply a ripening process (the fruit is exposed to light frost or sometimes a CO2 fire extinguisher for a few days after it is ripe), but in others there is a chemical process (water, alcohol. or carbon dioxide treatments) used commercially to remove the astringency.[3]
Once the process is complete, the flesh will have broken down enough that it can be spooned out of the skin. The taste of the sticky, mushy substance has been compared to sweet dates and dry applesauce, with a hint of cinnamon.[4] In Notes on a Cellar-Book, the great English oenophile George Saintsbury called bletted medlars the "ideal fruit to accompany wine."[5]
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thanks, for that, bogger. i might get a couple of fruit off my medlar and now i know what to do with it. also, i had to prune out a big shoot that was vying with another one to be leader -- it killed me to do it because it was already starting to be in leaf, but had to do it (also, should mention that the sheep in field next to me got in and took a few nibbles so the tree was precariously top heavy). for the craic, i stuck a bit of the pruned out shoot into the ground -- totally wrong time to strike a cutting. rules be damned... the thing is leafing out so something must be happening underneath. dying to know what, but have ruined too many a cutting in the past and know better not to peek... now i might have 2 medlar trees to blett fruit off of (or is that blet???). thx again for the info.
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no problem at all!!
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