Grilled fruit a delicious way to end a meal

You can smoke a brisket, grill up the best barbecue chicken of your life, flip burgers with ease, but if you grill a dessert that’s what everyone will remember.

Grilled desserts are delicious and an unexpected way to end a meal. Summer fruits are naturally sweet and the perfect choice for grilling. The heat brings out even more of their sugary flavor.

Here are a few tips before you start grilling up your dessert.

Clean the grill

If you just finished cooking a pile of burgers, you don’t want to be tossing fresh fruit on the greasy grill grate. You need to make sure that your grill is clean, re-oiled and on medium heat before you start dessert. Grilling at the end of a meal ensures that the temperature of the coals will be perfect.

Keep an eye on them

The key to grilling fruits is to watch them constantly. They can go from perfectly grilled to charred in a matter of seconds. Fruits contain sugar and can burn quickly when placed on the grill — even at low temperatures. Peaches and apples can take the heat a little longer than other fruits before they start to burn.

Most ripe fruits will take only a couple minutes on each side. During grilling, the heat will caramelize the sugars, make gorgeous grill marks and create delicious complex flavors. Contrast is everything with this dessert. Hot off the grill, the fruit is warm and almost crisp on the outside, yet still cool and juicy on the inside.

Which fruits?

Almost any fruit can be cooked on the grill. Choose fruits that are sweet and tart, such as peaches, mangoes, nectarines, apples, plums, pineapples and pears.

When picking a fruit for the grill, select fresh, firm fruit that is just short of being perfectly ripe. You will want a fruit that is solid enough to hold together and maintain its texture. Hard fruits like apples, pears and pineapples hold their shape and texture while cooking.

Take care when grilling softer fruits like peaches, nectarines, plums and mangos as they have a tendency to become soft and mushy if overcooked. You will need to be more attentive to these kinds of fruits.

Prep work

To prepare most fruits for grilling, simply cut them in half; split bananas lengthwise (leave the peels on to hold them together) and cut apples, pears and similar fruits down the middle, then core and remove the seeds. You can leave the peel or skin on, which holds them together, but that doesn’t mean you have to eat it. Cut large fruits and citrus into slices to expose the flesh to the flame.

Once you have cut the fruit, you have the option to soak it in water to help maximize the amount of liquid inside the fruit (keeps the fruit from drying out) or proceed straight to the grill. Should you decide to soak it, use enough cold water to completely cover the fruit and add 1 teaspoon of lemon juice to each cup of water to preserve the fruits’ color. Let it soak in the lemon water for 20 to 30 minutes. Add ice to keep the water cold.

If you want to step up the flavor, try adding spices to the soaking water and increase the soaking time. Simply throwing a stick of cinnamon into a bowl of soaking apples will enhance the flavor.