Feijoa paste

Having seen feijoa paste for sale in a fancy deli last year,  I decided to have a go at making my own.  This recipe was all over the internet, but it looked awfully fiddly, so I decided (encouraged by this site) to simply use the guava paste recipe I invented a few years back.  It worked well!  It was pretty easy to do, and has a great feijoa flavour :-)

Recipe

1. Take 1 x 10L bucket feijoas.  Scoop out flesh - should get about 2L.  Save the skins to make feijoa jelly or feijoa drinks.
2. Process to smooth in two batches in food processor then pass through a mouli to remove seeds (you can skip this step if you don't have a mouli).  Should get around 5 1/2 cups puree.
3. Put the puree in a wide pan with equal volume of sugar.  We use our big preserving pan and the high sides are great as they mean that the splatters are contained as the paste cooks down.  You only want about 2-3cm of puree/sugar mix in the bottom of the pan - do in batches if necessary.
4. Bring to the boil and cook, stirring frequently, until the mix has reduced to about half the volume and you can draw a wooden spoon right across the pan before the trace fully closes up.  Takes approx 20-25 min.
5. Pour into non-stick containers to about 1cm depth and leave to cool (which will take hours - it holds its heat amazingly).  We use a silicone tray that's about 20cm x 30cm.

If it's oozing fluid when it's cool, cut into large blocks and dry on a cooling rack in a warm place for a few days.

Store between layers of baking paper in air tight containers - will keep several years.  Delicious in thin slices on crackers with cheese, or eaten in small cubes as a lolly :-)

All the flesh from a 10L bucket full of feijoas - it's not as much as you might think!

Heaps of the volume of the feijoas is in the skins!  Don't throw them away, though - pop them in the freezer for later use...

Feijoa skins fermenting into a delicious fizzy drink (recipe)

Feijoa skin jelly (recipe)

Blocks of feijoa paste - yummy feijoa all year around!

Note: this recipe is almost identical to mine, but it uses much less sugar (60% of the volume of puree rather than 100%).  I've done it both ways, and I recommend using the larger amount of sugar.  If you use less sugar, you have to boil it much longer before it will set - 45 minutes or more.  I think that all this does is boils off more water - so the final product in either case contains the same amount of sugar - and you lose a lot of flavour with all that boiling.