Lychee substitutes

Sold in every Asian grocer and most large supermarkets, and it is the same fruit. Drain well, and keep the syrup, which is useful as part of the sweetener in a drink or dessert.

Best for

desserts, sticky rice plates, cocktails, iced drinks, fruit salads

The flesh is softer and less snappy than fresh, and the canning liquid takes the perfume down a notch while adding sugar, so a dessert made with it tastes sweeter and slightly flatter. Compensate by cutting the sugar in the recipe and adding a squeeze of lime to reintroduce brightness. For anything cooked, chilled or blended, the difference is barely noticeable.

Lychee's close cousin, sold fresh in bunches with a thin tan shell or canned in syrup. Smaller, with the same translucent flesh and a single seed.

Best for

desserts, sweet soups, drinks, fruit salads, sticky rice

Noticeably less floral than lychee and with a faintly musky, almost smoky sweetness that comes across as more grown-up and less perfumed. The flesh is firmer and chewier. In Thai desserts and drinks it is used almost interchangeably, so this is a strong swap; just expect the finished dish to smell less like flowers.

The hairy red-shelled relative. Peeled and canned, the flesh looks and behaves so much like lychee that most people cannot tell them apart in a bowl.

Best for

desserts, fruit cups, drinks, sticky rice plates

Slightly firmer, slightly more acidic and less intensely perfumed, which actually makes it a good choice for a dish that was already very sweet. Canned rambutan is often stuffed with pineapple, so check the label if you do not want that flavour in your dessert.

Use seedless green grapes, ideally muscat if you can find them, and slip the skins off if you have the patience. Toss with rose water and a teaspoon of sugar, and let them sit ten minutes.

Best for

fruit salads, desserts, drinks, garnish

The single best improvisation on this list, because it solves both problems at once: grapes already have lychee's firm snapping flesh and mild sweetness, and rose water supplies the floral perfume that is the actual signature of lychee. Go easy on the rose water, since a heavy hand tastes like soap. Skin-on grapes still work, they just look less like lychee.

Another Southeast Asian canned fruit with white segmented flesh, tangy and peachy with a floral edge of its own.

Best for

fruit cups, desserts, sweet soups

More tart than lychee and it comes in segments that break apart rather than staying as whole rounds, so a fruit plate built on it looks and eats differently. The flavour is genuinely lovely but distinct, so treat this as a swap that changes the dish rather than one that hides.

The supermarket-only option. Dice to roughly lychee size and drain thoroughly.

Best for

fruit salads, desserts, sticky rice plates

This is the honest least-bad choice when you have nothing tropical at all. You get the right juicy sweetness and roughly the right pale colour, but the texture is soft rather than springy and there is no floral character whatsoever, so a lychee dessert made with peaches simply becomes a peach dessert. A quarter teaspoon of rose water per cup helps considerably.