Tag: taste 1000 fruits

Taste 1,000 Fruits: No. 69 Kiwiberries

Taste 1,000 Fruits is an item on my Mighty Life List. I’m currently inching my way through the first hundred.

kbbowl

These are Kiwiberries, and they are rocking me out. They’re grape-sized Kiwis without the fuzzy exterior, and you can just pop them in your mouth. I’m pretty sure Willy Wonka was involved somehow.

kbberries

They’re delicious, by the way — sweeter and more intensely Kiwi-flavored than their larger Kiwi cousins, and so effing cute. Cute, I tell you!

kbinside

Inside, they look just like tiny Kiwis, with the seeds and everything. I want to have a party just so I can use them to garnish Kiwi-themed cocktails.

kbhand

Whooo’s a tiny little kiwi? Wuzzah-wuzzah.

Taste 1,000 Fruits: Tamarind

This is a tamarind pod.

Inside, the pod has a paste-like brown fruit around its seeds.

It doesn’t look particularly appetizing.

The fruit is very sour, but not like a lemon. There’s sweetness there too. It tastes almost like Crystal Light powder. But more delicious.

You suck the fruit away from the seeds. They’re hard, and clack together in your hand, almost like heavy coffee beans. Delicious.

Intel is making my site more interesting by sponsoring my Mighty Life List over the next few months. This trip to Puerto Rico is adding a few more fruits to my 1,000 fruits list.

Mighty Life List: Taste 1,000 Fruits, 2-7

While I’m in New York, Alice and I buy some exotic fruits from a gourmet grocer. We meet Sarah and Zan at my hotel bar, order a bottle of wine, and ask for a knife and some plates. The host offers to slice the fruits, to which Alice replies, “Hotels do everything for you. ‘I’ve brought you my baby, will you please circumsize him? Thank you.'”

After some light circumcision banter, we dig right in. Here are fruits two through seven:

2. Cape Gooseberries or Ground Cherries

I’ve tried these before, but they’re excellent. The texture is like a cherry tomato, only with a slightly thicker, sticky skin. Like giant salmon eggs.

They taste vibrant, like juicy orange Starbursts. Crowd favorite.

3. Horned Melon

I see these a lot at grocery stores, but I’d never tried one.

They’re small for a melon, about the size of my hand, but the inside?

Whaaaa? Did you expect a florescent green jelly interior with giant cucumber seeds? They should use these as flesh for scenes in movies when they cut into aliens and then the alien is all unexpected just beneath its humanoid skin.

Exciting! It smells fresh and very green, like unripe grapes.

The texture is amazing, but the flavor is less spectacular. It tastes like sweet cucumber, or the green fuzzy fruit that surrounds an almond shell. We all settle on “very fresh cucumber gummy bears.”

4. Sweet Galia Melon

Get a loada this melon!

The Sweet Galia Melon tasted like a more subtle, juicier honeydew. Eh. Good thing I spiced things up with the boob picture.

5. Feijoa

When I was little, my good friend and I terrified her mother by admitting we’d been gorging ourselves on these from a tree in the backyard. Her Mom had no idea whether they were poisonous at the time, but we assured her we’d been eating them for weeks. Great.

Sarah says they smell like one of those scented plastic babydolls we could get when we were kids — sort of a vanilla smell with pleasant offgassing just beneath it. You don’t eat the peel, but the edible seeds float in a translucent creamy gel. They taste a bit like kiwis with a mellow pineapple aftertaste. Mmmm.

6. Cactus Pear

This is the fruit of a cactus, which left tiny infuriating spines in my fingers.

Stupid Cactus Pear.

Look at the inside though! Gorgeous and bloody, like a beet. It smells like cut grass and cucumber.
We try it, and everyone feels deceived. Comparisons include “mealy cucumber with thick pumpkin seeds inside,” “celery with the flavor of a dry, less sweet watermelon.” Did we get a bad one? Blech.

7. Passionfruit

Passionfruit has a purple exterior that’s like a thin pumpkin shell. When you open it up, it’s another holy moly:

The inside looks slightly animal, the way a fig does. It has tendrils attached to orange goo with bright green crunchy seeds that pop when you chew them.

Sarah said it smelled like the Body Shop, and the goo has the flavor of a perfectly ripe, tart mango. With the pleasant crunch of the seeds, it reminded me a lot of orange flavored Pop Rocks. So we ordered some Coke to see if our stomachs would explode.

Delicious! The end.

Mighty Life: Taste 1,000 Fruits, Longanberries

I’m reading The Fruit Hunters, which is surprisingly fascinating. I’ve always been interested in fruit, but when this book pointed out that there were tens of thousands of varieties, I decided to add “Taste 1,000 fruits” to my life list. Isn’t that satisfyingly mythological?

A Thousand Nights of Sweetness
The Girl Who Tasted a Thousand Fruits
“Bring me one thousand fruits, and a toe from each of your virgins!”

Having grown up in California and traveled in Asia and Indonesia, I’ve already tasted a few hundred fruits (apple varieties alone will get you halfway there), but now I’m picking up interesting produce wherever I go.

These are Longan Berries, which I got on Clement St. in San Francisco. They’re native to Southern China, and are believed to help with relaxation.

They’re kind of like litchis. They have a thin, dry peel, and the interior has the texture of a peeled grape.

The taste is complex and sweet, a lot like a litchi. My friend gave a spot-on assessment of the lingering flavors when he said it reminded him of fresh paint, though not in an unpleasant way.

They’re called “dragon eyes” because, as you can see, they look like eyeballs.

There’s a lovely, smooth-shelled pit in the middle. According to Wikipedia, you can boil and eat the seeds, though I didn’t try that. I trust Wikipedia, but I’d be pissed if I accidentally poisoned myself on the word of some guy typing from his mom’s basement.