Can I please have pretty pear and apple slices?

December 21, 2017 2:31 PM

I'm making a fruit and cheese board for Christmas Eve. I just found some lovely Harry and David pears and some Granny Smith apples at Trader Joes. I would like to serve these sliced on the cheeseboard. Is there a best way to keep them from browning? Lemon juice? FruitFresh? We have to travel 45 minutes to get to the party, ideally, I would slice them at home, plate them and just whip off the plastic wrap at the party. Am I doomed to brown pear and apple slices?
posted by sarajane to Food & Drink (8 answers total)

Slice them and then reassemble them to fruit-shape, bundle them up in plastic wrap or something to hold the slices in place. When you get there, fan them out on the platter. (I use an apple slicer/corer thing for the kids lunch boxes and then sit the fruit inside a silicon cupcake holder!)
posted by slightlybewildered at 2:54 PM on December 21, 2017

Short answer: soak the slices in salt water for 10 min. You can rinse the slices after they've been soaked, and they will still resist going brown.

Full story with photos and lots of comparisons which is really quite fascinating here.
posted by Athanassiel at 3:00 PM on December 21, 2017

Wow, that Serious Eats article is pretty comprehensive and kinda convinced me of the salt method, but I came to say that I have had a lot of success slicing the apples and soaking them in a bath of 7-Up for 10 minutes. Three days before I saw browning. If you decide against salting, you might try that.
posted by DSime at 3:07 PM on December 21, 2017

Salt water is what we do at home.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:27 PM on December 21, 2017

I'd suggest waiting until you get there to slice, then slicing one or two and leaving a knife or two on the platter for anyone who wants to slice more. That way any uneaten fruit remains whole and there's less of a rush to find a way to use it up.
posted by bunderful at 3:40 PM on December 21, 2017

I worked catering for a long time and we used lemon water -- worked fine. Fruit fresh is just citric acid, so that's fine too. I use citric acid now quite a bit because I have it around anyway.
posted by freezer cake at 3:49 PM on December 21, 2017

The grocery store pre-sliced apples use calcium ascorbate which looks like a vitamin c supplement. Never tried this, but you could probably buy a bottle of calcium ascorbate pills at a supplement store, put one pill in a bowl of water, soak your slices, and be good to go.
posted by gregr at 5:12 PM on December 21, 2017

We decided here that fruits sprinkled with "True Lemon," which we initially used just as an (effective) anti-browning agent, were more delicious than fruit without it, and now use it even on apples etc that we're going to eat right away.
posted by kmennie at 4:00 PM on December 22, 2017