Fresh figs are fairly common here at the right places. I saw some probably flown in at a high end market the other day. When I’ve bought them one is lucky if even half are soft ripe and sweet. They don’t sweeten all that much off the tree.
The figs I like, say Strawberry Verte, shrivel on the bush to very high brix, ie they are half dried. I’ve measured 44 brix in SV. Getting that off scale reading required diluting the fig 50:50 with distilled water for a reading of 22.
I don’t like the watery figs. Those are usually the big, over-watered ones. 10-12 brix isn’t really that good in a crisp apple much less a mushy fig.
[quote=“alan, post:21, topic:3718”]
They don’t sweeten all that much off the tree.
[/quote]figs off the trees apparently don’t have much starch to convert to sugars. So dehydration seems to be the only option. Admittedly a bit crude of an approach, but what was trying to convey was a teaspoon of sugar dissolved in a liter of water and the solution won’t really be sweet(an analogy to the very juicy but sub-prime figs). Since sugars don’t evaporate even with boiling, then heating the solution and getting rid of the excess ‘diluting’ water would make the solution sweeter.
if i remember it right, fresh live sugar cane register ‘only’ at 18-20 brix at the max, so traditional sugarcane farmers literally burn their sugarcane fields, effectively concentrating the sugars within(aside from getting rid of the razor sharp foliage and lightening the load for the laborers). Further dehydration in the processing plants result in crystalline sugar.
only caveat to figs, of course, is the weird and outright annoying fact that, many figs(depending on variety) come in such ‘unsterile packages’-- harvested with gaping(if not oozing) ‘eyes’ at their bottoms, which is a magnet for microbial invasion. So it is possible that when we let them dry up for a while(in the hopes of concentrating the sugar), the microbes would already have consumed much of the sugar before we do…
so to circumvent this, using a desiccator would speed up the process by concentrating the sugars quickly enough to be unfavorable to most microbes.
I got some huge fresh figs from Whole foods about four years ago and the bottom of the figs got rotted out by the eyes. I did not realized this and took a bite. it was horrible with that mildew sour taste. Lesion learned and never buy them again and planted my own fresh figs in ground.
Tony
‘eyes’ are inherent to figs, some just have gaping ones, and some with tight ones. What we think of as the fruit is actually the inflorescence(the actual tiny fruits will form inside), and the eye is where insects(and sadly, microbes) are invited to ‘do their thing’. The liquid oozing from the inflorescence is analogous to nectar of more ‘normal’ flowers.
When you buy figs in early to mid summer you are usually buying the breba crop which tends to be big, airy and only moderately sweet- I’ve no idea why. They are the figs that formed the year before towards the end of the season. Some growers say to just remove them, but they can be worth eating when no others are to be had.
even here in the desert, brebas tend to be subpar.
intriguing that having just mentioned li jujubes bearing airy and gigantic, and subpar in taste on their first crop of the year-- that figs-- their closest relatives are doing the same across the board/regions
mission figs tend to be the outlier, bearing good enough brebas
nice trick for measuring off the chart brix
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