Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s previous World of Wonder columns for The Butter can be found here.
Those of you who know my poetry know that I am just a weeeee bit obsessed with fruit. One of my favorite things to do when I travel is to sample a selection of local fruit, whatever happens to be in season. Here in western New York, I love to treat my family and friends to the bevy of juicy-crisp apples in the fall—such a sizzling variety here, all with their very own distinctive perfume: Cortland, Mutsu, Empire, Jonagold, Liberty, Winesap, and Macoun.
But I missed a bit of apple season this past fall, as I was lucky enough to be a visiting writer at Yale-Singapore’s campus. For my last day of teaching, the wonderful faculty and students arranged a classroom dinner—a lovely array of local foods, including a most memorable fruit plate piled high with something so marvelously PINK, I could barely keep my eyes off it because its pinkness looked downright…plastic! Even its name seemed to be fantasy–but there was certainly nothing fake about dragon fruit.
I prefer to call it dragon fruit, but other names for it include the Cinderella plant and the night-blooming Cereus. Some just call it a strawberry pear.
Photo via
Photo via
Pretty sure I wore this shade of pink in my nail polish pretty regularly in the ’80s. Okay, who am I kidding—I still love this color! It screams summertime, pop music, sunglasses balanced on your head, and temperatures much too warm for socks. It screams vintage MTV and Bubble-yum gum.
Hylocereus undatus is a cactus that offers up its hot pink pitaya (fruit) after a timely pollination process. The flowers are nocturnal—and bloom in full for just one night. That means they have one precious evening for a bat or moth to help pollinate it and turn it into a dragon fruit, otherwise the 6” spiky greenish white bloom wilts by sunrise.
Each dragon fruit is about 3-4” long, and the inside is ghostly white with tiny black kiwi-like seeds. In fact, the texture and taste is like a duller kiwi, but still sweet, especially when chilled. Many food stands in Singapore and Thailand sell dragon fruit juice and I’m despondent that I didn’t get a chance to have some during my visit. Maybe I’ll get to on the next time I find myself on the other side of this planet.
And back here in western New York, we are on the cusp of summer—I hope I’m not jinxing myself—and that is my favorite season for fruit here: berries of all kinds, and the sweetest of sweet corn, it might as well be a fruit, too! I’m curious to know what fruit are YOU looking forward to the most (one not quite yet in season in your area, but will be soon)? Or, what is the one fruit that piques your interest, but for whatever reason you just haven’t yet bit into one yet? Do share the juicy details with us in the comments below.
Tags: aimee nezhukumatathil, the butter, world of wonder
Wait until you see the purple dragonfruit…
I always feel a little cheated by dragonfruit. It looks so beautiful and dramatic, but the flavor is kind of lacking. I ate a lot of it anyway when I was in Malaysia, but it was never as good as I was hoping it would be.
Speaking of Malaysia and exotic fruits…nutmeg juice. They actually juice the fruit of the nutmeg, the fleshy part that grows around the hard part we use. It is delicious. Nutmeggy but not too strong. Why don’t we have that here?
My favorite in western Washington is cherries. I LOVE cherry season.
Yellow dragonfruit is better. We visited Tropical Fruit World last year and that was my favourite fruit of the many samples (even better than chocolate pudding fruit).
NUTMEG JUICE. I doubt I’ll be able to find it here in the frozen north but I have a new grocery mission.
If you do find it, don’t drink a lot at once even though it might be tempting because it is delicious. It can have a laxative effect. In restrained quantities, though, it’s excellent.
I kept trying it when I was in Thailand, but it just couldn’t compare to mangosteen or rambutan
I could eat bushels and bushels of mangosteen or rambutan. Or at least I wish I could! The asian market had a small batch of mangosteens a couple years ago when it became legal to import, but it was suuuuper expensive and I haven’t seen it since. Oh, tropical fruits. Why must you be so tasty?
Ugh this is so embarrassing but… A mango! I’ve never had one!
Also, if you love fruit, I highly recommend the documentary The Fruit Hunters. It’s on Netflix and it’s excellent and will teach you a lot! Plus Bill Pullman is in it!
If you do want to try a mango, I’d advise you to get one of the smaller yellow “champagne” ones (also called Ataulfo mangoes.) I think they are way better than the standard green/red bigger ones.
Seconded! They are much tastier and have a nicer texture!
When you have your mango, do not neglect to gnaw and suck the remaining flesh off the pit. It’s inelegant, and you may want to be alone and possibly standing over the sink, but that’s the best part.
Scraping off the skin with your teeth is the best part, IMO. But, yes, get all of it!
It’s the vegetarian version of eating chicken wings: delicious, essential to proper consumption of the foodstuff, and totally impossible to do with any dignity.
I await with eagerness the few Grey Pairmain apples I can get each year. They’re not really a commercial fruit, so when they are in season I must stalk the farmer’s market like a weird fruitarian puma.
Or peaches. Peaches are nice too.
Bleh, dragonfruit. Looks so promising, so full of intrigue and mystery, with its neon pink and greenness, its tentacular appendages streaming behind it. Tastes so boring. It’s not even a less-interesting kiwi, it’s a fruit made for people whose favorite thing about the kiwi are the seeds and who can’t stand flavor.
Cherimoya, on the other hand…they look terrifying on the outside (green! lumpy! scaly!) but are so lovely on the inside (soft and slightly grainy, like the best pear, but with a creamy sweet flavor!). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherimoya
I love cherimoya! any kind of custard apple is OK in my book. 🙂
Custard apple is another delicious fruit I certainly cannot ever find! mmmmmm….
I prefer the guanabana. Same family, delicious as can be.
My fave here in the midwest is black raspberries. People outside the midwest (and not a few in it) look at you like you are crazy and don’t know what a blackberry is. No! It’s a raspberry! That is black! And far more delicious than either blackberries or red raspberries. They are only in season for a couple of weeks and you pretty much have to grow them yourself or stalk the farmers market.
I got some in a CSA last year, and they are SO good.
YASSS. I was just coming over here to mention black raspberries. I grew up in Michigan loving them — they would grow wild in our back yard, enough so that some years we’d get a batch of freezer jam out of them. Then my parents moved house and I went to college. Then many years later I got divorced and rented a house with a HUGE patch of them growing nearby. After Hubs 2.0 and I bought our own house, one of my first garden projects was to try to cultivate them in our yard. It’s been about four years (animals love to eat the shoots) and a couple of conversations with the Michigan farmer from whom I bought them online, but I have high hopes for this summer. Wish me and the canes luck!
OH! I’d been wondering what that was! http://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/tren…
Same, that was the only one I couldn’t identify or even guess at.
There’s an article in the current issue of Lucky Peach magazine about folks in California who, like, hoard citrus varieties. They have hundreds of varieties! Tons of ones I’ve never heard of! It was really interesting.
My favorite recent discovery of a fruit is the rambutan. They are actually absolutely delicious, but when my cousin pulled them out as our “new fruit” of the year, all anyone at the table could say is, “are those…hairy testicles?”
https://www.google.com/search?q=rambutan&es_s… (Note: the ones that my cousin bought were browner than the pictures, just adding to the testicle-ness of them.)
Also, I really want a good Jonagold apple, but while I could find them easily at farmers markets in Chicago, I haven’t found them in New England.
I tried some rambutan(s?) before, and they were delicious! I should get some more. They actually stock them regularly at Wegmans, where I do most of my grocery shopping.
If I could have one mild superpower it would be the ability to perfectly assess the quality of fruit at a grocery store. Dunno if any other food has such high variance between its best and worst forms.
I’ve been pretty obsessed with kiwis ever since I realized how easy it is to eat them with a spoon. I also have this enchantment with mangosteen, but it’s incredibly hard to find them (and usually expensive when you do), so I haven’t had them in years. Finally, lifelong loves: yellow pears, nectarines, satsuma oranges, and tiny green grapes.
That’s the best idea for a superpower I’ve ever heard.
Clearly anyone who manages to buy good avocados has this super power.
Oh my word, mangosteens. I finally had one a year ago, and they are amazing. Completely worthless once they make the trip Stateside, though.
I’m a strawberry fiend and can easily consume pounds of it during berry season. The one fruit I’ve always wanted to try is durian, just to see if it lives up to its infamy.
I will eat pretty much anything in the world at least once, but durian is the one thing I am afeared of…
A group of friends from work tried durian once. Someone got it from a Korean market, and brought it to work in the trunk of her car and as we drove to a nearby park we could smell it. We very carefully set up downwind of the group of children innocently playing at the park. I would say that it smells worse than it tastes. A few of us sort of liked it – I didn’t – but no one threw up! I think it tastes like a combo of mango and onion…which for sure is gross, but at least the flavors are sort of identifiable.
I’m much more afraid of live octopus, which is where I draw the line at trying things. I won’t eat anything that is still mobile.
You know it’s a tasty culinary experience when the best thing you can say is that no one threw up! 🙂
I would say that it does. Durian has some nice creamy custardy aspects, but the oniony garbage odor is indeed unpleasant. It isn’t really quite as bad as “oniony garbage odor” makes it sound, in my experience, but it isn’t great either, because who wants to smell that while they’re eating custardy fruit? Still, though, if you get the chance, do try it. It’s an interesting experience.
I’ve also had some that had been frozen and lost the malevolent traits, and it was very good.
I have been dying to eat chirimoya again, but I’ve only ever seen it once in stores here. It’s absolutely delicious and the texture is like a cross between ice cream and custard.
I saw those on Chopped a few times – those are the ones with Very Poisonous Seeds, yes?
There is nothing better than a fresh, juicy fig – but they are so hard to come by!
I just wanted to say that I absolutely love your World of Wonder posts. There are so many awesome and interesting things in the world, and you’ve opened my eyes to so many! I can’t wait to see more 🙂
They sell dragon fruit all over NYC. Especialliy Chinatown (like at every corner) but other neighborhoods too if you know where to look. Lychee too! And like 5 different kinds of mangos. I love the city.
Oh man. The peaches we grow up here are just unbelievable. One of my former co-workers has an entire peach ORCHARD and hers are probably the best I’ve ever had.
I mean, we have a lot of fruit. Cherries, primarily, but also lovely apples, and grapes! But the grapes are mostly important because they become wine.
Crabapples. My grandparents had a giant crabapple tree, and I started eating them when I was just a toddler, and I adore them. But there’s a ridiculous range of crabapple varieties (even amongst the edible ones) and while I think I’ve figured out the variety of my crabapples, it is damn near impossible to find them for sale, and other varieties are just… not right. They aren’t *my* crabapples, you know? So the first thing I’m going to do when I have a bit of land is buy a Dolgo crabapple tree and I will be a happy lady.
Ahh dragon fruit. You’ve just kinda destroyed a long time hope of mine. I’ve always thought dragon fruit was kinda boring tasting but since I had never been anywhere it had grown naturally I assumed it was like have tomatoes in winter. I always thought if I could just get to somewhere where it was native it would be delicious and wonderful. (sigh)
Dragon fruit are neat looking so they always ended up in fruit salads, plates, and bowls at the better hotels I’ve worked at. My favorite is that they are so easy to peel, cut, and handle that it was the easiest when chef told you to cube enough of them for 300 fruit plates.
The fruit I’m most looking forward to is my apples from the tree in my yard. It’s a limelight apple and I only planted the sapling 2 years ago. There’s been aphids, and last year the poor thing only had three flowers and no fruit. I wasn’t even sure I had the right kind of apples trees in the neighborhood to get it pollinated, but my neighbor’s bees did their jobs and there’s going to be at least 4 apples this fall! Can’t wait to taste them.
If you’re looking for taste, then you’ll need the red variety. The white variety are quite tasteless in contrast. The other thing is you need to seek organically grown fruit too, as chemical fertilizers dampen the traditional taste. Finally, only buy fruit that is in season- growers will force fruit to grow out of season by using chemicals and use lights at night to fox the plants into thinking it’s still the season of 12+ hours of daylight- which is what the plants need to flower and bear fruit.
Pitaya makes a refreshing summer drink if you blend it with water and a little sugar. I also like to eat it with fresh lime juice.
I live in Mexico and I love MAMEY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pouteria_sapota In a smoothie with milk it tastes like dessert.
DRAGON FRUIT! I learned it existed when I was staying in Hong Kong. My friends and I were all struck by the contrast between the bright exterior and the somewhat bland interior, both in color and taste. (Still very good chilled, though, and very thirst-quenching.)
I live in southern Europe, and am looking forward to: apricots! peaches! nectarines! strawberries! melons! watermelons!
Some of my favorite fruit comes in the fall, though: white peaches (hard to find outside that time of year) and figs.
Now, if only ripe, sweet fruit were easier to find in my town without having to make the rounds of a kajillion shops and stands…
Every so often I close my eyes and think about rollinia. I tried it the first and only time a couple of months ago in south Florida at the Fruit and Spice Park, which is exactly what it says on the tin, a park full of tropical and subtropical edible plants. You can go around on foot and eat anything (a) that you can identify as safe and (b) that is on the ground–no picking things off trees. Or you can take the tour and wait for the guide to use his/her powers of good to cut off something delicious and pass it around. The guide saw the rollinia, judged it ripe for the picking, and gave us each a wedge of it. It was sweet and fragrant and creamy and custardy, and I had flown down from a Minnesota winter to a wondrous land of sunshine where perfect beauty grew on trees. Heaven.
I was sad to miss mango season, though. The relatives with whom we were staying said that mangoes in season there were like zucchini in the Midwest–everybody has more than they know what to do with. Their own mangoes, however, were always in high demand because they fed them with coffee grounds to make them sweeter.
I LOVE FRUIT.
I would very much like to go to a fruit park. That sounds amazing.
I have already enjoyed strawberries (though it rained too much for them to be very good this year) and I look forward to soon enjoying peaches and raspberries. I will also have blue and black berries, which are good, but not as good as raspberries. I don’t guess there’s much else until apple season, as I can’t quite manage to work up an interest in muscadines, and figs straight up creep me out.
Mmmm, fruit. One of my coworkers is sadly fruit-sheltered and we’ve decided to have an office party wherein we bring many different fruits so we can taste them all. I’ve been to a few of the international grocery stores around me and I am super excited to go fruit-shopping-crazy.
I really like starfruits and lychees and pomelos (like fat, less bitter grapefruit) from the stores. And foraging for mulberries and raspberries and, when I am in Florida, loquats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loquat
One time, I bought some fruit at a Korean grocery store and they turned out to be the best grapes ever – the size and color of small plums and sold loose, not in a bunch. The skins were really thick (for grapes) and they were so sweet and juicy and perfumey. Ah…
I’m prepping for pawpaw hunting in the fall, now that I have an idea of what the trees look like. Never tried one before, so fingers crossed.
The first time I tried pomelo I thought it was pretty good. Then I learned the Latin name is CITRUS MAXIMUS and that really sealed the deal.
In highschool I did study abroad in costa rica. Which has about 20 billion amazing fruits just growing all over. I wasn’t a big fan of most fruits, but that trip changed me into a fruit snob. And best of all is that everyone just constantly drinks them as milkshakes (batidos).
Pejibaye which is a savory sort of fruit thing. like a squash potato chestnut.
Rambutan which is called mamon chino.
Pavones
Guanabana
Cas- like a grapefruit lemony thing usually with the ground up seeds adding a peppery thing to it.
And there are mulberry type thing and a different red berry i never learned the name of and more. SO good. go to costa rica if you want to eat a billionty fruits.
I am all about trying new things. Recently spent 3 weeks in Thailand and while there came across many fruit juice and smoothie stalls. They pretty much blend up fruit with a little ice and call it a “smoothie.” We were in Chiang Mai, visiting a night market. It was 8 o’clock at night but the temperature was still in the high 90’s. A refreshing fruit-smoothie-thing-drink sounded perfect, and I immediately gravitated toward a fruit I had never sampled before: dragonfruit. It was great! Flash forward to some hours later, I wake up in bed because my face feels “weird.” I go to the mirror in the bathroom and behold: my lower lip had turned into a giant, pink beanbag. It was so turgid, it hung off my face exposing my lower teeth even when my mouth was closed. I woke up my husband with a frantic, “MY YIPSH SHWOWEN, ISH SHAT BAD?!” He reasoned that since it had been hours since I had ingested the offending fruit that this was probably the worst of it and could wait till the dawn hours. I woke up at 4 in the morning and proceeded to read every article about anaphylactic shock on the internet while sitting in a deck chair by the pool. Ultimately, when the rest of the world got up, someone had a Claritin and I was fine. Still going to keep shoving weird stuff in my face.
As a Singaporean, I gotta say, it’s super amusing to see people being amazed about dragonfruit/durian/rambutans/lychees/starfruit/pomelo 😛
I’m a slightly odd person – although I’d always pick fruits over veg in the abstract, I end up eating way more veg than fruit most of the time because I’m a cheapskate uni student and at least veg can go in actual meals.
Here in Michigan we are best known for cherries and apples, but just tons of lovely things are grown here in our foreshortened summers. The blueberries, raspberries and strawberries, especially “U-picked,” can be fantastic. Some things can’t really be cultivated or sent to market that easily, though, so you just have to be lucky enough to own or run across things like black raspberries (see above), or a really good mulberry tree. Last year was FANTASTIC for mulberries, and when they are good they are just tree candy waiting for you to rescue them from the birds (who surely can’t appreciate them like I can, and moreover will only use them to crap purple on things). There were some trees that overhung my parking lot at work that were just loaded down with mulberries, so I became the crazy lady hanging out back there to harvest them. Unfortunately, I may have drawn too much attention to them, because a big brush-clearing happened that fall, and they were all cut way back from the fence around the lot (it’s not a good idea to go around the fence and explore back there either, what with animals up to and including stray dogs lurking around occasionally). In fact, mulberries grow so fast and invasively here that much of my experience with them involves cutting them back and out of fences. I’m trying to let one grow in our yard, though — fingers crossed for another good year.