Pineapple obviously comes to mind when one things of Hawaii, but among locals, perhaps no fruit tastes more like home than the lilikoi. Potlucks often have lilikoi lemonade and cheesecake topped with passion fruit sauce, pancakes are served with lilikoi syrup and homemade passion fruit butter is gifted at Christmas. I've never grown my own lilikoi simply because I didn't know how to juice it, but I recently came across excellent suggestions for how to juice a lilikoi so maybe I'll get a vine planted. If anything else, I can enjoy the passion fruit flowers, which are absolutely gorgeous.
There are tons of lilikoi recipes out there, and for folks like me who don't grow their own passion fruit, Da Vine Foods sells pure passion fruit puree without sugar or anything else added. It saves the sticky work of processing and you can use it for practically anything.
Da Vine Foods has all kinds of lilikoi products and I've tried several: A drink mixer, a lilikoi coconut butter that I spread on toast and mixed into homemade fruit popsicles, and most recently I had the lilikoi chili pepper sauce. I was a little skeptical to try it, but it made a nice, sweet salad dressing and added pizazz to our boiled shrimp. Next, I want to try the lilikoi coconut syrup, just after I finish the mysore raspberry syrup I recently made.
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| We got a little wild at dinner and added lilikoi chili pepper sauce to our shrimp and salad. |
