A compote, French for a thick, lightly sweetened sauce made by cooking down fresh fruit until they turn syrupy and ooze their juices. Typically not as sweet or thick as jam, a compote is a product that has limited shelf life and tastes best when consumed fresh. With the spring season setting in, in India, local mulberries, also known as shehtoot, are available in abundance at this time of year. These sweet and sour berries are underrated but high on flavour and extremely nutritious to consume.

By making a berry compote, you get to control the amount of sugar that goes into this runny, berry-flavoured sauce, which tastes amazing when stuffed into doughnuts, spooned over a cheesecake or stack of pancakes. While the framework for a compote recipe is pretty much the same for any kind of fruit, ensuring that you always pick the freshest, ripest berries, is crucial to make sure that the juices are extracted as they cook. You could also use organic maple syrup, honey or jaggery as substitutes for sugar, although do keep in mind that each of those also bring their individual flavours to the compote.

Image Credits: WhyFarmIt

Ingredients

• 250 grams fresh mulberries
• 3 teaspoons sugar
• ½ cup water
• Juice of half a lemon

Method

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• Wash the mulberries and detach them from the stems. Pat them dry and add them to a pan on low heat.
• Squeeze in the lemon and add the sugar and stir everything once to ensure that the ingredients have combined.
• Once the mulberries start to cook down, the flesh will burst open, having all the juices run out. In case the compote feels too thick before it cooks down, add a quarter cup of water to start with and more, if necessary.
• Cook on a medium-high flame for 5-10 minutes and allow it to cool down before pouring into an air-tight jar and refrigerating for up to two weeks.