Fruit, Fruit, Delicious Fruit

manggis -  yum yum!!

Lately I've decided to purchase and try more unfamiliar fruits, since we are surrounded by them at every turn. Tropical fruits are plentiful and inexpensive here, whereas at home they are either non-existent or too expensive to buy, especially if I'm unsure I would even like them. So I decided to branch out on my fruit choices and see what some of these strange and sometimes surprisingly ugly fruits taste like.

rambutans near our apartment

Of course some of these are sold in the larger western supermarkets, but here we see them everywhere - on carts, in grocery stores and just spread out along the street side. Right now the rambutans are in season, so we often see them piled high in the back of a pick up truck or hanging in bunches from makeshift racks. Rambutans come in different sizes (perhaps the small ones have a different name?) and are really ugly, almost scary to look at, but also very tasty! However, the smaller ones may just be more trouble than they're worth, given the handling of them and the amount of actual flesh produced from a good sized bundle. The small ones that I bought this week revealed a piece of fruit about the size of a grape which also contained a large seed. A lot of work for not a lot of reward. Plus mine were covered with ants!

mango vendor outside Pasar Baru

 

 

 

dragon fruit in the market

manggis

I see others such as burmese grapes, jack fruit, rose apples and star fruit in the supermarket but have yet to try them. They're on my list. Of course the stores carry the standard melons and fruits that we're used to seeing at home. Bananas and pineapples are plenteous and cheap. In the past when I've tried papayas, I always found them to be bland and tasteless. That's because I didn't know how to select them. Now I know that they have to be turning orange and black and looking almost rotten before they are ripe and sweet.

Mangoes of all varieties are extremely popular, beautiful and tempting; however I am extremely allergic to them, so I cast but a glance and pass them by (being careful not to touch them as it's actually the oil in their skin that I'm allergic to).




I have been wanting to try manggis for some time and finally had our driver buy some last week. They were not a disappointment! I had been warned to be careful when peeling, as the juice in their peel looks like grape juice and will stain any clothing it comes in contact with. But like rambutan, there is not a lot of flesh and it would take several good sized manggis to make a decent serving. Still, the flavor is so worth it!

star fruit surrounded by durians

Several Indonesians have told me that the star fruit is "good for health" and specifically blood pressure. My landlady buys them by the bag full on her weekly market run and makes juice from them. I think the riper ones are the ones showing some orange. I will try them soon.

fresh coconut growing in Bali

Who knew the coconut was a fruit? I didn't but it technically is. There are lots of fresh coconuts here! And they are sold still in both layers - the larger, softer outer one and the smaller, hadrer one we see in US. The big difference is that fresh ones have little in common with their US counterparts. Ronnie, who has always loved coconut, wanted me to get him one so I had the driver stop and pick out a good one. I was excited to give it to him but when he opened it, the flesh was somewhat slimy - nothing at all like the texture of the older coconuts that we're used to! We didn't realize that was what a fresh coconut was supposed to taste like and since neither of us liked it, we threw it out.

snake frui

We tasted our first snake fruit when it showed up in our fruit basket in Bali. Peeling away its hard shell - a bit harder than an avocado - reveals a firm, crunchy flesh (perhaps closer in texture to a firm pear than anything else I can think of) surrounding a large black seed. Good, but not nearly as sweet and wonderful as the manggis!