Roasted stone fruit | Fruit recipes | Jamie Oliver recipes (2024)

FAQs

What is considered a stone fruit? ›

Officially, they're fruits with a fleshy exterior known as the mesocarp (covered with a skin, or exocarp) that encases a stone or pit (the shell of which is a hardened endocarp with a seed inside). Also known as drupes, this category includes peaches, plums, cherries, nectarines, apricots, and pluots.

In contrast, apples, pears, and berries are not stone fruits, as they do not have single pits but rather many small seeds in the core or distributed throughout their flesh.

One of the most popular stone fruits, peaches have a furry skin and a large pit. Like some other stone fruits, they can come in either clingstone or freestone and white or yellow varieties. They can even come in flat, round varieties that resemble donuts.

Stone fruit season runs from late spring (cherries and apricots) through mid to late summer and into early fall (mangoes, peaches, nectarines, and plums).

A berry is a fleshy fruit with many seeds inside (blueberries, tomatoes, oranges, grapes, etc). Berries have a fleshy endocarp (inner layer) and mesocarp (middle layer). A stone fruit or drupe, meanwhile, is a fleshy fruit with a hard pit inside which contains a single seed (peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, etc).

The banana also has a somewhat soft skin, juicy flesh, and many tiny seeds. (Granted, the seeds are so small that you probably don't even feel or notice them when eating a banana.) So, bananas are true berries—though we'll be the first to admit that it's hard to see 'em as berries in the way most of us use the word.

Nope. They are considered a berry because they have a fleshy pulp and a seed.

A stone fruit or drupe, meanwhile, is a fleshy fruit with a hard pit inside which contains a single seed (peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, etc). Drupes have a fleshy mesocarp but a tough, leathery endocarp. An avocado is fleshy throughout, so it cannot be considered a drupe.

Several other familiar fruits come from the rose family but are not stone fruits. They include strawberries, pome fruits like apples and pears, and cane fruits like blackberries and raspberries.

Cherries have pits in the middle that cannot be eaten, so they cannot be classified as berries but instead are stone fruits. Berries have seeds in the middle, and you can enjoy the whole fruit, seeds and all.

Which fruit is a stone fruit disorder? ›

Stone fruits comprise climacteric fruits like peach, plum, nectarines and apricot which are harvested at the onset of maturity and non-climacteric fruit like cherry in which ripening occurs on trees before harvesting.