Quince substitutes

The closest common fruit in flavour family and acidity, and the easiest thing to buy.

Best for

lamb and beef stews, tagines and pilafs, baked desserts and crumbles, jams and jellies, roast pork and duck

The big difference is time, not taste. Quince can simmer for an hour and a half and still hold its shape, while apple turns to sauce in fifteen or twenty minutes, so cut the pieces at least twice as large and add them near the end of cooking rather than at the start. Apple is sweeter and much less perfumed, so add a strip of lemon zest and a teaspoon of lemon juice per apple, and expect no pink colour at all.

The best aromatic match, since pear shares quince's floral, honeyed perfume more closely than apple does.

Best for

poached fruit desserts, spiced syrups with clove and cinnamon, roasting alongside meat, cheese boards, chutneys

Choose pears that are still rock hard, because a ripe pear disintegrates. Even so they will be tender in twenty to thirty minutes against quince's ninety, and they are considerably sweeter, so cut the sugar and add extra lemon to bring back quince's tartness. The syrup will stay pale gold instead of turning ruby, and the texture will be soft and yielding rather than dense and slightly grainy.

The most convincing stand-in, because apple supplies the tartness and structure while pear supplies the perfume.

Best for

ayva tatlisi style poached desserts, stews and tagines, compotes, anything where quince is named specifically

Cook them in stages: apple first, pear in the last ten minutes. Add a couple of apple cores and their seeds tied in muslin to the pan, which contributes both pectin and a little of quince's grippy astringency, then fish them out. This gets you genuinely close on flavour, and still will not reproduce quince's dense flesh or the pink colour that develops over long cooking.

When you want the actual taste of quince rather than pieces of fruit, cooked quince and sugar in block form gives you exactly that.

Best for

sauces and glazes, sweetening and perfuming a stew, cheese plates, filling for pastries, flavouring a poaching syrup

This is the one substitute that tastes unmistakably of quince, because it is quince. What it cannot do is be a chunk of fruit on the plate, and it is heavily sweetened, so cut the recipe's sugar accordingly and add lemon juice to compensate. Melt it into a spoonful of hot water or stock before stirring it in, or it sits in stubborn lumps.

Crunchy, juicy, mild fruits for the rare recipes that call for raw quince shaved thin.

Best for

salads, slaws, raw garnish, pickling

Raw quince is rarely called for precisely because most varieties are hard, dry and mouth-puckeringly astringent, so if you have a raw recipe it is looking for crisp texture and gentle floral flavour rather than intensity. Asian pear delivers the crunch and juice but tastes bland-sweet, so dress it with lemon and a little salt. Do not attempt to eat a substituted-for quince raw expecting the same thing.

Some quince dishes are entirely about the fruit's specific pectin, density and colour change, and a swap will not get you there.

Best for

understanding what you are giving up, deciding whether to cook something else instead

Poached quince dessert works because the fruit stays intact for over an hour while its tannins oxidise to deep rose and its pectin turns the syrup thick and jelly-like. No apple or pear does that. If you attempt it, expect a pale, softer, thinner dessert in about a third of the cooking time, and add a strip of lemon peel, extra sugar and the apple cores for pectin. If the whole point is the pink quince, it is better to cook a pear dessert on purpose than a disappointing imitation.