When ripe and sweet, there’s few fruits to beat a fig. The current Turkish season also heralds a huge drop in price. Their black figs are top quality and shockingly reasonable to buy  – what’s not to like?

Key Facts

From a botanical angle, figs are a marvel. The ‘fruits’ actually consist of thousands of very small flowers that develop inside the fruit itself.

Figs have been eaten and harvested by humans for millennia. Some of the older species are remarkable in that they require pollination by a special fig wasp, whose role is crawl inside the fruit to pollinate the flowers.  Most modern cultivars of fig are less fussy and self fertile.

In the UK, fig trees tend to produce just one crop per year but fig trees in warmer countries may produce up to three harvests throughout the year.

Other key exporters of figs to the UK include Brazil, Greece, Italy and France.

Uses in the Kitchen

Figs are unsurpassed when fresh and fully ripe. Classic savoury pairings include with salty Parma ham, cheeses such as ricotta, goats’ and blues, or bitter salad leaves such as chicory. For desserts, figs can be roasted with spices and perhaps drizzled with honey or baked into tarts, cakes and other puddings.

You can dry fresh  figs to preserve them. Slow roasting figs for four hours or so makes them fantastically rich in flavour, with a soft chewy texture.  Figs can also be used in jams and chutneys to great effect.