Anjeer is the dry fruit people buy least often and ask about most carefully, usually because they have been disappointed once. A bag of hard, grey, faintly sour figs is a memorable waste of money.
It is also one of the easier things to judge, if you know what you are looking at.
Size is the grade
Dried figs are graded by how many make up a kilo. Fewer per kilo means each one is larger, and larger is priced higher.
That is the entire difference between Jumbo Anjeer and Regular Anjeer on our shelf. Same fruit, same drying, bigger fruit.
Bigger is not automatically better to eat. A large fig has proportionally more of the soft centre, which is what people like, but a well dried regular fig beats a badly dried jumbo every time. Size is a reliable guide to price and an unreliable guide to quality.
What to look at before you buy
- It should give under a thumb. A dried fig that is rock hard has been sitting too long or was dried too aggressively. It will not soften properly even soaked.
- Pale golden-brown, not grey. Grey is age. Very dark brown usually means heat.
- A white bloom is fine. People return figs over this and they should not — that dusty white surface is natural sugar coming out of the fruit, and it is a sign of a sweet fig, not a spoiled one. Mould is fuzzy, patchy and smells wrong. Bloom is even and smells of fig.
- Look at the shape. A good dried fig is flattened but still round. Ones that have collapsed to a disc were poor fruit before they were dried.
- Break one open. The inside should be pink-amber and dense with seeds. Hollow or dry inside means it dried out on the tree.
How to keep them
Anjeer picks up moisture faster than almost anything else on a dry fruit shelf, and moisture is what makes it sticky, then mouldy. An airtight jar away from the stove is enough. In a humid month, the fridge.
What they should not do is sit in an open bowl on a counter for a fortnight, which is where most of the anjeer people are disappointed by has been.
Soaking
Two or three figs in water overnight is the common practice, and it is worth knowing what soaking actually does: it softens the fruit and makes it easier to eat, particularly for anyone who finds dried figs hard work. Soak them in plain water, not milk, if you are keeping them overnight at room temperature.
We are not going to make health claims here. What we will say is that a fig you enjoy eating is one you will keep eating, and that is worth more than any claim on a packet.
Buying a small amount first
Anjeer is expensive enough that a bad kilo hurts. Everything here is weighed to order, so buy two hundred and fifty grams, open them at home, break one in half, and decide before you commit.
That is the advice we would give across the counter, and it does not change because you are reading it online.
Written at the counter in Salumbar, where these questions get asked every week.
