13 Canned Fruits You Should Consider Stocking In Your Pantry

Since time immemorial, humanity has been beset by a love of fruit alongside the bitter knowledge that seasonal fruits come and go seemingly in the blink of an eye. Fortunately, back in the early 1800s, French confectioner Nicolas Appert came up with a handy process called "canning" that could keep the stuff on the shelves for a lot longer than it could otherwise last. The rest, as they say, is history. Regardless of whether you can buy it yourself at home or in steel cans from your local grocery store, canned fruit is a staple of many pantries.

While some worry about the canning process zapping a fruit's nutritional value, the loss of some vitamins doesn't mean that canned fruit is without nourishment. Rather, the fruit chosen for canning tends to represent the best of their respective crop and generally retains roughly the same nutrients as fresh produce. This has helped its reputation as a cheap, affordable, and, yes, healthy snack. Still, there's so much more to canned fruit than the basic vitamins we get from them, and they are always a good addition to the pantry due to both their longevity and versatility. While fresh fruit is a wonderful seasonal treat, canned fruit is easily available all year long, so it's good to stock a variety.

Alongside peaches, pears are one of the more consistently available canned fruits, and they can be used in just about anything you would put peaches in. This makes them not just a solid pantry item to keep around in their own right but also a possible fill-in should you run out of other canned fruits. Pears have a subtly sweet depth that sometimes goes unappreciated, but its adaptability is where it really shines. Keep them in your cupboard for a rainy day, and they'll always be ready should the inspiration strike to expand your pear-based recipes.

The somewhat neutral citrus overtones of pears combine exceptionally well with spicier ingredients such as chai, and the two complement each other nicely in smoothies. Pear berry salsa is an interesting alternative to dip into if you're looking to go a step beyond your standard pico de gallo mix. If you're open to inventive pizza toppings, you might feel brave enough to try out a BBQ pizza with roasted pears on top. At this point, chefs have put canned pears into everything from breakfast hash to spring rolls, so it can't hurt to stock a few extra cans on your next trip to the grocery store.

Cherries originally hail from Asia Minor and are believed to have been brought to Europe via bird migration, which is a pretty neat origin story for a fruit that currently grows just about everywhere that climate allows. Recorded history featuring cherries dates back to 72 B.C., and today the world produces more than 650 tons of cherries every year. You may have only tried a few kinds of cherries in your life, but there are more than 1,000 different varieties grown in the U.S. alone. Canned cherries can cover a lot of ground when it comes to specific taste profiles, but they're known for their tart taste, which works excellently in tandem with the sweet, flakey crust of a cherry pie.

Indeed, cherries are perhaps best known for their ability to complement desserts, making them a go-to for cheesecakes, cobblers, pies, and cakes. Cocktail cherries have a proud place in the realm of adult beverages as well, working as a garnish for everything from old fashioned to bourbon bombs. A lot of drinks that don't include cherries in the recipe can be modified slightly to add them, leaving the door wide open for experimental concoctions. Adding cherries to gin and tonics, whiskey sours, margaritas, and manhattans can create what feels like a completely different drink from the originals, so any mixologist will likely have jars of cherries on the shelf.

Most canned mandarins are satsuma mandarins, which are easily bruised during shipping and have only had a chance to reach such heights of global popularity through the magic of canning. Small and seedless, they make for excellent healthy snack foods with a lengthy shelf life, which might be why a lot of kids across the U.S. regularly find them packed into lunches. Many experts advise parents to incorporate them into their children's meals as early as nine months of age due to their substantial health benefits, and the fine art of canning has made them widely available just about anywhere you get your groceries.

Mandarin oranges also work exceptionally well in smoothies, and adding a little banana, flaxseed, and milk can exceed your daily recommended dosage of fruit in a single drink. Similarly, they can make for a great addition to salads, pairing well with greens of any kind as well as other popular toppings like cranberries, pecans, or sunflower seeds. This is another canned fruit that has made some surprising appearances in recipe books, be that via salsas or as a pizza topping. Still, if you want to keep it simple, they are well-suited to be a mid-day snack, offering a healthy alternative to chips or pastries.

Grapefruit can be a fairly contentious fruit, as the slightly bitter taste that makes them relatively unpopular has long fought it out against the incredible nutritional value that makes them such an essential part of many diets. Some eat grapefruit with salt to make them a bit more palatable, while many others juice them to add to smoothies or other drinks, and others still simply like the unique flavor of grapefruits on their own. Canning methods are historically how we prevent large-scale waste with these seasonal fruits, so they're another item on this list that benefits greatly from the process.

Wherever you fall on the grapefruit scale, you can easily make good use of them in any number of recipes. Canned grapefruit may not be quite as readily available as its more popular shelf-mates like peaches and pears, but that's all the more reason to keep them around in case the need for them arises. Grapefruit works very well in cocktails, with the slightly bitter, slightly sweet flavor of alcohol matching the similar taste of the fruit. Like mandarin oranges, canned grapefruit are good salad topping as well, granting your greens a more subdued taste than the strong citrus of oranges.

Hailing from Southeast Asia, canned jackfruit has only recently risen in popularity in the U.S., with vegans and vegetarians regularly using its malleable profile as a basis for recipes ranging from tacos to BBQ sandwiches. These can be pretty unwieldy fruit in its fresh, whole form, clocking in at as much as forty pounds. This makes it fairly understandable as to why you usually only see them in a can and perhaps why it took so long for Americans to get wise to the many different uses for jackfruit. Now that the cat is out of the bag, this is something you'll want to keep stocked because you never know when you'll need a can of jackfruit.

You can buy canned jackfruit both unripe, where it is used as a vegetable, or ripe, which is sweeter and tastes like a combination of banana and pineapple. Due to being canned in brine, it's good to rinse jackfruit before using it, but after that, the sky is the limit. Much like with tofu, taking extra time to marinate and season unripe jackfruit can work wonders for how they end up tasting at the end of the day, so be sure to do a little research on how to eat them before just popping open the can and hoping for the best. That said, they are especially useful as a meat substitute and can be prepared as fried "chicken" drumsticks, "tuna" salad, and BBQ "ribs," among other possibilities. For ripe jackfruit, you can use them in desserts or eat them right out of the can.

Olives are classically found in the Mediterranean Basin but were brought to North America by Spanish colonists in the late 1700s. As such, the black canned olives that you see in grocery stores are actually native to Mexico and Central America. Today, there are over 130 varieties of olive grown across 23 different countries, meaning that it might take some trial and error to work your way through figuring out which kind you prefer. Fortunately, each olive has a unique use, with green olives associated as a cocktail garnish, while kalamata olives tend to be put in salads and sandwiches.

Naturally, canned black olives are well-known for their prominence as a pizza topping, but they also pop up frequently in salads and pasta. Visiting the olive bar at your local grocery store will inform you how olives can be prepared, with stuffed olives intended as a stand-alone snack while other olives are intended to accompany other ingredients. Olives of all kinds tend to be used more as a garnish than a main character in most recipes, but with that said, they're great to eat right out of the jar, offering up a snack high in antioxidants and healthy fats.