Fruit Maven » tropical

Star Apple (Caimito)

Fruit Maven — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:36:53 +0000

I love brightly colored fruit. It takes what I already think is super fun and just multiplies it times a billion. Plus I’m a sucker for star patterns in fruit, so I was ecstatic when Specialty Produce let me know they had gotten a few of these in stock.

Star apples, or caimitos are also related to the mamey sapote, which I tried for the first time last week and enjoyed. This group of tropicals must be coming in to season as we start spring. Yay! Because the wait for all the summer fruit is basically killing me.

Unfortunately, the star apple was all promise and no pizzazz. It was horribly difficult to cut in any pleasing way. I could not for the life of me get that star to look great. And it’s covered in a light bit of latex, which tastes bitter and will coat your mouth in an awful way. When you try this fruit, be sure to rinse the fruit even after cutting. I have a history with latex and jackfruit, so I was relieved that my fingers didn’t stick together this time–but still a pain.

All in all, this is a super fun fruit for showing your friends and seeking out if you are a fruit adventurer, like me (and you)? But the flavor was mediocre at best. I’d reach for a longan, lychee, rambutan or even a grape way before a star apple.

Star Apple

APPEARANCE 3.5 out of 5 stars

Slightly bigger than a golf ball. Purple, rust and green skin. Fuschia to deep purple flesh with a white center and black seeds that form a star pattern.

AROMA 4 out of 5 stars

Sweet, herbal and faintly tropical.

TEXTURE 1.5 out of 5 stars

Chewy, gelatinous and slightly fibrous. Not dense and luscious like the best longans, lychees and rambutans. Similar in texture to a peeled grape. I scooped the flesh easily with a spoon.

TASTE 2.5 out of 5 stars

Slightly sweet and a bit herbal – dangling right on the edge of bitter. Some bites reminiscent of an apple, which I probably mainly think because the name of the fruit gives that away. Leaves a slight film in my mouth.

OVERALL 2.88 out of 5 stars

This is a cool looking fruit, with the range of purple and pink colors and the promise of a star pattern in the flesh. Plus it is unusual, which always wins points with me. But it has latex, was hard to cut in an appealing way, tricky to eat and wasn’t all that delightful. I can’t imagine going out of my way to get one of these again. Let me know if you’ve had one of these and loved it. Did I miss something?

FRUIT Star Apple	PEAK Spring	PROVIDED BY Specialty Produce
VARIETY Unknown	GROWN Florida

Mamey Sapote

Fruit Maven — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 03:34:28 +0000

It was an innocent Monday afternoon and I placed my latest prize on the table. I cut in to the one that looked the closest to perfect: a slight give in the skin, no obvious bruising, heavy flesh.

It was a gorgeous orange and I ran my spoon in to the soft flesh as it gave easily. Pausing briefly to take in the yeasty aroma, I tucked a small bite in to my mouth. It softened on my tongue and the texture quickly changed to a powdery substance. Suddenly my lips were smacking like a dog who had eaten peanut butter. The mumbling and cussing began, “What the? Did someone just swap out my mamey sapote for a poisoned cotton ball?”

I headed directly to Google noting this was not the first time I’ve come close to being poisoned from my fruit ventures. My lips and tongue were still smacking. The tannic coating was everywhere. This could not be right…

Luckily, the internet delivered, as it often does, with information that would have been useful prior to me shoving the fruit in my mouth. Apparently this one, with its gorgeous orange flesh wasn’t quite ripe. The skin should be a slightly deeper color, closer to red and the texture on the outside should give very easily when pressed. Luckily I had another one and while the flavor here was quite good, the texture was a mix of perfectly soft pudding and cooking string. I think this one was a day too late. I ate a few bites and then scooped the rest to freeze for a milkshake. I only had access to two of these and they were a generous gift from my friends at Specialty Produce, so I don’t blame the fruit at all for my failures. If you can get your hands on one, my advice would be to get some insight from whoever is selling or giving it to you on when to eat it because the flavor is very promising.

APPEARANCE 3.5 out of 5 stars

Brown sand paper, leathery pod, about the size of an average man’s full hand. Orange/red, salmon flesh with a large, shiny brown seed.

AROMA 3 out of 5 stars

Strong sweet potato and yeast combo. Slightly sweet. Neither good nor bad.

TEXTURE 3.5 out of 5 stars

Soft texture. Dense and smooth in some spots, stringy in others (like a mediocre avocado). Slippery in your mouth.

TASTE 4 out of 5 stars

Cooked sweet pumpkin or sweet potato with a nutty undertone.

OVERALL 3.5 out of 5 stars

While this first foray in to the world of the mamey sapote was a bit dicey, I would definitely look for more of these. I adore pumpkin and sweet potato and pudding so somewhere in here there is bound to be a favorite fruit. I just know it.

FRUIT Mamey Sapote	PEAK Spring	PROVIDED BY Specialty Produce
VARIETY Unknown	GROWN California

OTHER NONSENSE

Mamey Sapote is the national fruit of Cuba, which leads me to wonder about the national fruit of the United States. Apparently we don’t have one. WHAT a travesty! Why aren’t fruit growers canvasing the streets? Why aren’t our presidential hopefuls talking about this grave absence? Where is the dignity?

White Indian Guava

Fruit Maven — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:34:21 +0000

Does anything rhyme with guava? The topic of fruit seriously lends itself to rhyming and yet there are so many that have no rhyming words. You can grapple with apple but orange is just borange. See? I can’t communicate strongly enough how much this annoys me. How am I supposed to be cute and clever working with words like guava? I guess I could shorten it. Guav are mauve. Except they’re not. Or “Don’t jump in the lava. Eat a guava!” A new tag line for Hawaii perhaps.

So I tried this not-mauv guav a few weeks ago and was surprised by how much I liked it. Guava flavored things are generally pretty great as is guava nectar. But most fresh guava are way too acidic for me. If you let them ripen extra long, they do sweeten up but it can be hard to tell. Plus you have to rely on the farmer to do this and that’s kind of a crap shoot in my experience. I tried quite a few of these though and they were all pretty good (minus the ubiquitous, rock hard BB gun pellets passing themselves off as seeds). And it seems like a good sign when research shows that growing this variety is a favorite of rare fruit fanciers (whatever that is). I hope I’m one! But I doubt it since I don’t grow anything except a little mold in the fridge when my fruit buying habit gets out of control.

White Indian Guava

APPEARANCE 4 out of 5 stars

Smooth, muted chartreuse skin, with gorgeous peach flesh.

AROMA 5 out of 5 stars

Extremely pungent, tropical fragrance that fills the room with the smell of pineapple and banana.

TEXTURE 3.5 out of 5 stars

Flesh is soft and melting somewhat like slightly fibrous pudding. Gritty skin reminiscent of pears and an overwhelming amount of annoyingly hard seeds.

TASTE 4.5 out of 5 stars

Delightfully mild and sweet. Not overly acidic. Reminds me of an exotic creamy banana mixed with a sweet tangerine. Very well balanced.

OVERALL 4.25 out of 5 stars

This is my new favorite type of guava. I just need to figure out how to strain out those seeds and I’ll be all set. If you come across this type, be sure to snatch a batch.

FRUIT Guava	PEAK Winter/Spring	PURCHASED n/a
VARIETY White Indian	GROWN California

OTHER NONSENSE

I like to rhyme. I do it all the time. Especially when I’m feeling sublime from finding a lime. At times I share my lime with a mime so he can use it to clean the grime from his dimes. Sometimes.

Ice Cream Bean Fruit

Fruit Maven — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:07:58 +0000

Last month I was on the hunt for a fruit that started with the letter I, having recently been a little obsessed with acquiring a fruit for every letter of the alphabet. I already have X, Q and Z, so not having a fruit starting with the very popular letter I was a little frustrating. At the time I happened to be emailing back and forth with a local San Diego farmer from Encanto Farms who specializes in Figs and Bananas. He has over 500 figs and over 100 banana varieties. So I asked him if he had any that started with I. To my shock and delight, he had an Ice Cream Bean Fruit (neither a fig nor a banana hilariously). I couldn’t believe it. I scheduled a time with him, packed my family in to the car and headed out on a Saturday.

His last email to me said this:

“You will be surprised, when you arrive at the ‘World’s premiere Nano-nursery’ in the middle of the ghetto. I’ll be in the jungle.”

He wasn’t joking. It was a kooky little jungle smack dab in the middle of a neighborhood in San Diego. I loved it immediately. Not because I grow things or want a jungle of my own, I’m way too terrified of bugs and worms for that. But because it was so delightfully packed to the brim with focused and eccentric passion and care. It was absolutely spectacular!

Sometimes I catch myself going through life so annoyed with people – aggravated that the person I’m interacting with isn’t being more thoughtful or kind or attentive to whatever it is I think I deserve at that moment. And then I meet people like Jon at Encanto Farms and I am reminded that people are SO COOL and are into the most amazing things. I promise you, the person next to you is into something spectacular that you may or may not know about. The challenge is often to draw it out of people. I can be a little awkward in new social situations so he probably didn’t realize how thrilled I was to meet him and be there at his jungle oasis, but I WAS. I really was. I mean look at that Ice Cream Bean Fruit – so weird. So fantastical*. Have I mentioned lately that I love my hobbies?

*New Year’s resolution to make up more goofy words.

Ice Cream Bean Fruit

APPEARANCE 1 out of 5 stars

6-12 inch long greenish-yellow, lumpy pods with white fuzz inside surrounding 5-10 black sprouted beans.

AROMA 2 out of 5 stars

Raw peas.

TEXTURE 3 out of 5 stars

Peel has a fuzzy canvas texture to it (I did not eat this part), while the inside is full of big soft black seeds surrounded by fluffy and very moist cotton strands that mush together in your mouth.

TASTE 4 out of 5 stars

It pretty much tastes like a low-key simple syrup. Plain, sweet, sugar flavor.

OVERALL 2.5 out of 5 stars

Eating this fruit is like saturating a cotton ball in sugar water and then sucking on it. Neat I suppose, but not particularly appealing or practical unless you are starving in the wild in which case this would be a spectacular discovery.

FRUIT Ice Cream Bean	PEAK Intermittent year round	PROVIDED BY Encanto Farms
GROWN San Diego, California

Jack Fruit

Fruit Maven — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 04:48:47 +0000

If you were the kid that painted glue on the palm of your hand so you could peel it off like dead skin, then this is the fruit for you!

I don’t generally associate glue with fruit. It just doesn’t cross my mind. So nothing about the fruit I picked up this weekend made me think I would be permanently bonded to it. Being the Fruit Maven, you might be inclined to believe that I know a thing or two about fruit. That’s what I tend to think. So when I encounter new fruit, I don’t generally do a lot of research first. I like to experience the fruit for myself before I read up on it. I would say 90% of the time, this method works just fine. But every now and then I realize I should probably take a few cues from the more experienced before I dive right in to something.

Case in point — the jack fruit. This a honker of a fruit. It’s huge and heavy (the one I had was about 20 lbs.) and has a hard outer skin, reminiscent of a young pinecone. I had tasted one of the arils (fleshy bits that you eat) in the past that a coworker had sliced up and it tasted tender and delicious with a nice musky, tropical fragrance. How hard could it be to cut one up myself? So I got out my chefs knife and convinced my friend to slice in to it (ah haha, I’m smart enough not to do it myself). Then we found the latex, or should I say super glue. It was insane. Everything started sticking together — fingers, knives, fruit, all of it. Soap didn’t even begin to address it. Yikes. That’s when I turned to the internet. One site said to use the smooth paper from a magazine to wipe away the latex. Sounded simple enough so I tried it. I ended up with a perfume ad stuck to my palm and no real answer when my friend walked back in the room, “What are you doing to that magazine?” Um…

Needless to say, if you end up with a jackfruit on your table or decide you want to buy one and give it a go, I highly recommend watching a pro do it first. I posted one of the most informative videos below about slicing in to it and getting all the way to the good stuff. It’s an adventure for sure. I am pretty sure two of my fingers are now permanently webbed.

APPEARANCE 2 out of 5 stars

Rather large, oval fruit bigger than a watermelon with spiky, hard skin. Inside consists of a core, rags (fibrous bits that surround the part you eat), arils (the fleshy edible section), the latex (oil absolutely everything that touches it), and seeds (can be roasted like chestnuts – though I’ve never done this. But I have never roasted chestnuts either despite annually singing about doing it.)

AROMA 5 out of 5 stars

Powerfully fragrant, which I understand only gets more pungent (with a hint of onions) when perfectly ripe. I think this one was slightly under-ripe so the fragrance was relatively mellow and an ideal combination of pineapple and mango.

TEXTURE 3.5 out of 5 stars

Somewhat crunchy but without the snap. Has a dense texture with some give to it and is slightly fibrous. I have tried one in the past that was much softer and a little juicier. There are lots of different varieties that provide different textures.

TASTE 5 out of 5 stars

Tastes pretty close to how it smells – a lovely combination of tropical fruit with mango and pineapple at the forefront.

OVERALL 3.88 out of 5 stars

The jackfruit is the largest tree bearing fruit in the world ranging from 10-100+ lbs. The flavor is absolutely delicious, but not exactly worth the work unless you make a party out of it. My strongest recommendation would be to befriend someone who grew up eating these and likes to cut in to them and do all the work, then just pop over and eat some. Also, invite me.

FRUIT Jackfruit	PEAK Summer, Fall (this one was likely shipped in)	PURCHASED Specialty Asian Fruit Shop
VARIETY Unknown	GROWN Unknown

JACKFRUIT RECIPES

BBQ Pulled Jackfruit Sandwich (WOW)
Jackfruit Curry
Jackfruit Pancakes

COMMENTS

Have you tried cutting in to a jackfruit? How did it go? Did you accidentally glue your hand to something? Do tell…