fruit-related question meme

[corvi]

From here. I just wanted to post about hala.

1. What is your favourite fruit?

The childhood peaches that fall off the tree into the pool, and you swim up under them and bite at them, imagining you're a shark eating a surfer. The peaches are warmer than the water, intensely fuzzy, and they're so sweet and good it hurts your mouth a little. Some part of you will always be nine years old, a ferocious peach-eating shark, while the water casts bright ripples on your skin and you can feel the the two months of summer vacation left like it's as vast as the stars.

Every really good fruit carries an echo of being a nine year old peach shark with two months of summer vacation left. Sunlight you can eat, traveled 150 million kilometers through the void and packaged up by a plant as a gift for a beloved animal whose ancestors were friendly with its ancestors.

Even so, juli and I have planted a peach tree.



Current Official Fruit Obsessions (subject to change without notice):

• wax fruit, Myrica rubra, which I recently got to try for the first time after pie acquired some. Unremarkable artificial pomegranate sort of flavour, but extremely satisfying texture - it's made of columns radiating out from a hard central seed, and your teeth tear through each column individually. Have you ever wanted to eat a particularly juicy hairbrush? You can!
• Hyuganatsu, a Japanese citrus. The best citrus there is. Sweet edible peel, slightly sour interior. Tastes like if every glass of lemonade was a treasure map and this was the thing they all pointed to. Tastes like summer. Has a surprising amount of the nine year old peach shark nature.
• thimbleberry, a local fruit related to raspberries and blackberries. Tastes like a raspberry with some extra spice notes, maybe clove or ginger. Extremely flimsy, unfortunately, unsuited for commercial production. The wild ones here are almost ripe, so I've been checking on them and thinking about them a lot.
• choke cherries, bird cherries, bitter cherries, etc - there are a lot of these interbreeding wild cherries (sometimes hybridized with sweet cherries) along roadsides on the island. juli and I like to try a fruit from a tree, and if it's merely make-a-face bitter, as opposed to turn-your-face-inside-out bitter, we'll pick a handful from the tree, take them home, mash them up, and make chocolate ice cream with them. The cherry-bitterness blends into the chocolate-bitterness quite nicely. Though there's definitely a genre of "food only foragers like" and bitter cherry chocolate ice cream might be in it.
• Arbutus unedo, a European relative of our beloved native Arbutus menziesii trees. I love arbutus trees (giant arbutus tattoo on my forearm!) but the fruits, though beautiful, are inedibly hard. The idea of an arbutus whose fruit you can eat - whose fruit is traditionally made into booze with cinnamon! - is very appealing.

2. What is the most overrated fruit?

I like intensely flavoured fruit that is both sweet and sour. Fruit ought to dance in your mouth a little.

That said, I can enjoy fruits with delicate flavours, like the subtle floral jasmine thing lychees have sometimes, though if more aggressive lychees that made you feel like you were desperately trying to extricate yourself from a tangly jasmine plant with a machete existed, I would like those better.

Sometimes farmers develop a breed of some strongly flavoured fruit to be delicate, subtle, and sweet, and then market it as sophisticated and sell it at a premium. You made it worse! And more expensive! White peaches and Rainier cherries are both guilty of this. Overrated.

Also canteloupe and honeydew don't taste like anything. Overrated.



3. What is the most underrated fruit?

Old fashioned jarred sour cherries for pie making. Do not make pie. Eat with spoon.

Durian's not "underrated" so much as "controversial" for its intense sulfury garlic sort of smell. As far as I'm concerned, there's a suprisingly easy trick to enjoying it if you're not used to sweet sulfur things: you can just use it as a savoury ingredient. I had some really excellent durian flatbread at Dough Zone in Seattle once, and I was like, "hey, this is wonderful, why didn't I think to try sweet-garlic durian in a savoury context earlier?"

Tachibana are small wild oranges traditionally planted at the entrance to temples in Japan. They're decorative; people don't generally eat them. I have no idea why not, juli and I thought they were delicious!







4. Which fruit is the most beautiful?

Juli and I found a mostly-intact hala in a park in Hawaii once - I think in Honolulu - and spent quite a while marvelling at how pretty it was. This is not our hala, but ours looked like this, except smaller and more dinged up:




I figured out what it was about ten years later, and have been kicking myself for not nibbling it ever since. :) It felt very fibrous and tough and didn't seem at all edible. You can either cook it, or chew on the red ends of the segments to get juice out, like chewing on sugar cane. It is in the same genus as pandan and supposedly has a similar vanilla-y flavour to pandan leaves.

We are growing pandan trees in the greenhouse, so in many decades we might have a fruit that looks rather like this, but less colourful (light green inside) to finally right that old wrong. :)

5. When you're making a fruit salad, how many fruits do you put in it, and which ones?

My usual fruit salad (for company only, we just eat fruit on its own) is two fruits: strawberries, and a second fruit with a yellow or orange colour, a dense texture and a tart flavour. Pineapple, apricot, and mango are good The Other Fruit.

Pomegranate seeds and one of the above The Other Fruits is pretty good, too.

Comments

[juli]

I didn't realize hala was a Pandanus!

[twoeleven]

I didn't realize hala existed. :)

[twoeleven]

You seem to have much deeper relationships with fruit than I do.

[corvi]

Despite the fact that every living thing we know of or can imagine does it, I find the process of selecting matter to construct myself out of genuinely weird, and interesting. Three-ish times a day I wander into the kitchen and pick out something that will become me. What the heck.

Also, I think my general interest in natural history type stuff bleeds into an interest in food via foraging and gardening hobbies. Do you have Opinions About / Relationship with Blueberries? I would imagine you do, after devoting your time and skill to their existence.

[twoeleven]

I'm looking for blueberries that taste like blueberries. Most store-bought blueberries are a variety called Jersey. They're big and sweet, but typically very bland. Wild blueberries have actual flavor; some are as intense as artificial blueberry flavoring, but have more flavor notes. They're also a bit on the tart side, which works well with the little bit of sweetness they have. Traditionally, they're pie and jam berries, and one would add more sugar during preparation.

I don't need something quite that strong, but I do want the rich flavor. I'm struggling with it. I think I fixed the pH problem I had, but I think the summers have gotten too hot for the wild and semi-domesticated¹ blueberries I have to have good bud set. Buuut, the last few years haven't been typical weather, so we'll have to see. (One of my bushes is Jersey, to provide precious bodily fluids pollen to the others. Jersey always has good bud set, which means lots of flowers the next year.)

1: A couple of my bushes are hybrids between two wild types, one of which is resistant to a bunch of diseases. They're both wild, but it's not a natually-occurring hybrid because they're from different areas of the US.

[twoeleven]

Also, for the most part, we're just borrowing the atoms in our food. The carbs are turned over pretty quickly, except for a small part which ends up in our DNA. Fats and oils the same, though some end up in odd places, after being modified and turned into more us. Proteins may stick around for longer, depending on which proteins and diet.

The only atoms we really hang on to are metals: iron, manganese, copper. They're relatively rare in nature, even in food, so we've evolved uptake and scavenging systems that try to keep them around as long as possible. People with adequate intake (that is, taking mineral supplements or having a very metal-rich diet) might hang on to some of their metal atoms for life.

[kadenza]

Loved this whole post! 😊 Your ode to pool peaches is wonderful.

[corvi]

Thank you!

[twoeleven]

It really is wonderful. "you can feel the the two months of summer vacation left like it's as vast as the stars" has a Bradburyesque feel to it.

[nnozomi]

What a gorgeous, evocative post, featuring many fruits new to me! I'll see if I can get hold of some hyuganatsu to try. (Fruit in Japan so often, as you mention, seems to be bred to be as large, sweet, and boring as possible; hence my summertime search for the less common, and much more delicious, nectarines over insipid peaches.)
Tha hala fruit is so lovely! It looks more like a geode than something edible.

[corvi]

I would love to hear about hyuganatsu when you get some! We've only had it twice, shipped from Japan by Fancy Fruit People. We're trying to grow the seeds in our greenhouse, but it will be years before we know how that turns out. :)

[maribou]

That hala is so pretty, it *looks* like it comes from a volcano island.

[corvi]

The website I got the image from title the article "The Fruit That Looks Like An Exploding Planet."

[dorchadas]

There are a lot of fruits here I've never heard of! Then again, the Midwest is not particularly good for a lot of delicious fruits most of the year.