Sweet Lychee Sauce

A smooth, pourable dessert sauce made from pure lychee, with a little real vanilla. 68% fruit, in a 290 g bottle that gives about nine generous serves.

It's the highest fruit content of anything we bottle. A chef would call it a coulis, which just means a fruit purée strained smooth and sweetened. We call it a sweet sauce because that's what you do with it.

No, and the names sit close together so it's worth being clear. The Sweet Lychee Sauce is a dessert sauce: sweet, smooth, no heat at all, for ice cream and pancakes. The Lychee Sweet Chilli Sauce is savoury, with a mild chilli warmth, for dipping and glazing.

One goes on dessert, the other goes on dinner.

• Poured over vanilla ice cream, the reason it exists
• On pancakes, waffles and French toast
• Over pavlova, panna cotta or cheesecake
• Swirled through yoghurt, mascarpone or whipped cream

Check out our recipe collection for more recipes.

Pourable straight from the bottle, thick enough to coat the back of a spoon and hold a ribbon over ice cream, thin enough that you never need to warm or thin it.

Yes, real vanilla extract, and only a whisper of it, about a tenth of one percent.

We originally planned a lychee-only sauce, then tasted it beside a version carrying a little vanilla and changed our minds. It doesn't announce itself. It rounds the lychee out and makes it taste more like itself.

Because we haven't coloured it. Lychee flesh is translucent white, so a sauce made from nothing but lychee is a pale golden colour. Anything vividly pink has had something added to make it that way.

No. It carries the smallest stabilising dose of xanthan gum we could get away with, five hundredths of one percent, which is enough to hold it together but not enough to stop it settling entirely, and deliberately not enough to make it gummy.

We could have added more and made it look flawless in the bottle. It would have poured worse. Give it a shake.

Refrigerate after opening and use within about three weeks. It's lower in sugar than the jam, so it has a shorter open life.