6 oz cheese - California

June's fruit pastes are very concentrated fruit purées which have been cooked down to the consistency of a thick paste. They're intensely flavored and particularly nice with savories. Try them as an accompaniment to meat and cheese courses, on crostini with fresh cheese, alongside pâtés, or in sandwiches - create your own specialty!

About the Producer
For June, everything starts with the fruit, or more accurately, fruits: she uses 50 to 60 different varieties in creating her products! Her fruit is organic, nearly all grown locally (in California), and she is passionate about high quality and excellent flavor, so if a particular fruit is having a substandard year, she will pass on it that season and try something else.

June has a relationship of trust with the farmers who produce fruit for her, and they understand her rigorous quality standards. She insists on small, completely hand-produced batches of her products. The process is involved and labor-intensive, but once you've tasted her preserves and marmalades, you may wonder why anyone does it differently. Even the lovely letterpress labels for her jars are applied by hand.

June specializes in heirloom and other forgotten fruits, those ignored by companies, large and small, whose product profiles are set in stone. The fruit is hand-cut and then cooked, quickly, to maintain maximum flavor. June adds only minimal amounts of sugar and only the fruit's natural pectin, basing her methods not on a formula but on taste and flavor, and so each batch is different. She would rather produce a soft-set marmalade in which the fruit shines through than meet an industrial, artificial expectation of how stiff it should be.