Gefiltesushi: Lena and Ari's Life

Fruit!

When I found out we were moving to Manila for 5 months, one of the things I was most excited about was the fruit. Oh yeah, and living in a new culture and stuff, that too, definitely. (If you haven't read this book, you should.)

So, since we've arrived a couple weeks ago, I've been scouring the markets for fruits I've never tried before. So far, I think I'm up to 6 or 7. I've been photographically documenting the process with my professional-grade iphone 3GS and industry-standard flourescent kitchen lighting, so for posterity's sake, I am going to post the results here over the next few days. Enjoy!

And yes, it's been about 5 years since I last updated this blog. Definitely getting my money's worth.

Rambutan

This is one of my favorite fruits in the world and has been since I first tasted them. We actually discovered these in Vietnam on our honeymoon, recounted here. You can find them occasionally at Asian markets in the DC area. Though they are originally from Southeast Asia, they are grown in Central America as well now. 

The rambutan's appearance is its most distinguishing characteristic - a small reddish-green ball with gangly red tentacles sprouting off in all directions. Crack it open - either by squeezing the shell with your fingers, or slicing it with a knife, and you find the clearish-white fruit, with the texture of a very crunchy grape. The flavor, at its best, is like a very fruity, crisp melon - it's not overpoweringly sweet like many tropical fruits. When overripe, they get very juicy and sticky, with an unpleasant moldy taste. Like many tropical fruits, the window of ripeness is very small, and too frequently during our stay in Manila, I would buy kilos at the market, only to have to throw out the last couple packages because we didn't consume them within two or three days.

After many tries, I was very happy when Nicky finally developed a taste for these, after discovering that if you bite into it, rather than just licking the outside, it tastes much better. After this revelation, he would bite into the top and then suck out the juice for mintues at a time.

 

Marang

This big, strange-looking fruit was always placed near the similar-sized durians at the market. For this reason, we didn't really think of trying one, I guess guilt by association. 

In fact, it is a completely different fruit, and a week before leaving the Philippines, I decided to buy one. They are round or oblong and the skin is made up of half-inch spikes that make it difficult to tell from the outside where the skin ends and the fruit begins. Lena commented that it looked like you're eating a hedgehog. They are very common in Mindanao, but comparitively rare and expensive in Manila. Again needed to look on youtube to figure out what to do. Apparently you just trim open the skin, exposing the fruit inside, which you can then eat with a fork. It's made up of hundreds of grape-sized pods, each with an almond-sized pit inside.

When they sit in your kitchen, the fill the room with a faint burning charcoal smell. It's not bad, but it's unique, and does overpower the other smells in the room. When you open them up, they definitely look other-worldly, and to an American eye, not really appetizing. But we dove in anyway. The first one we tried, we'd let go slightly too long. The fruit tasted like a very, very sweet overripe banana. Not bad, but not something you'd want to charge through - the thing is huge. It would probably take 4-5 people to get through one of these in one sitting, and they're not meant to be stored.

We ate a few of the pods, but didn't get very far. A few days later, Lena's colleagues brought her one back from a trip to Mindanao. It was much fresher, and we got it at the right time. This time, the pods were lighter cream-colored instead of brownish-white, and not as sickly sweet and the flavor much more unique, not as banana-like. It was delicious. Lena described the flavor like the "лох" with which she was familiar growing up. We tried translating this through Wikipedia and got "Russian silverberry", something I'd never heard of or tasted. This time, we ate about half of it.

Snake fruit

I had never heard of this fruit. When I was visiting Bangkok, we went to a market looking for local fruit. The pickings were pretty slim, but my friend Ivana suggested getting these unusual-looking things. I asked her if they were any good and she said they were ok.

They are a dark reddish-brownish color, longer than they are wide, and about three to four inches long. The skin is rough and prickly, which I believe, gives them their name. They are very light, and when holding one, I was doubting that there would be much fruit to enjoy. Because the dry outer skin protects the fruit inside, on first glance, it was hard to believe that what was inside would be 'fruity' at all.

I had to read online about how to eat them. I'm not sure how people approached these problems before youtube. You have to tear off the pointy top of the skin, and then peel it away, revealing a small, smooth orange-colored fruit. This is the edible part, although the pit inside is a pretty big part of this. 

It was surpisingly delicious. Another sweet-tart flavor, not super sweet, but very refreshing and also surprisingly juicy considering how dry the outside feels. It kind of reminded me of those chewable vitamin-c tablets we used to take when we were kids, but with a very soft and spongy texture. 

Chico

I was looking forward to finding these in the Philippines. I actually discovered them last year while on a work trip to Laos. They look very similar to kiwis, mainly oblong and brown, but without the kiwi fuzz. You could mistake them for small potatoes as well. I bought them off a cart in Vientiane because they looked interesting, and without any guidance tried to figure out how to open them in my hotel room.

Without any expectations, I was elated at what I found. I tried eating it by laboriously peeling off the skin with a knife (you can eat them this way, but it's best to just slice in half and then eat with a spoon, I later discovered). The flesh is a bright to brownish orange. My first impression was that it tasted like caramel. Chicos are deeply, syrupy sweet. The texture is a little gritty, but when perfectly ripe, very soft. I saw it one place described as a pear soaked in brown sugar, and I thought this came pretty close to describing the taste.

In Laos, we couldn't find anyone who could translate the name for us, but upon searching I later found that they're called 'sapodillas' in English - they're native to latin America and made it to southeast Asia through colonial trade.

When we arrived in the Philippines, I was psyched to find that these were in peak season, with kilos available for about $1. They went out of season after about a month, and the ones you could get never reached that peak of ripeness or sweetness. Chicos that are unripe or past ripe have a horrible, spit-it-out astringent sticky taste that leaves your mouth feel dry and that require glasses of water to wash away. It's understandable why these don't make it to east coast US markets - the window on ripeness is only a couple of days.

This was probably Nicky's favorite fruit of all the ones we found in the Philippines - we often mixed them with yogurt for lunch, and he learned to request 'ki-koo's. 

Mangosteen

This one is the juggernaut. We'd heard about mangosteens for years, but had never had the chance to try them for real. Once I found them frozen in a northern Virginia Asian market, so I bought them, but can't imagine that the taste was anything like real ones.

We waited a while for these. We kept hearing that the season in the Philippines is 'next month', but they never appeared at the market except as $10/kg imports from Thailand. Finally, when we went to Singapore in August, we found them, cheap and plentiful at the Chinatown market, and we induldged.

There are some things that, despite their hype, are worth the wait and the effort to find. If you read about mangosteens, you see the often-repeated rumor that Queen Victoria once offered a prize to anyone who could bring her back a ripe mangosteen. They have been called the 'queen of fruits' (durian is apparently king). In some ways, the quest to find them reminded me of journeys to see Angkor Wat and the Taj Mahal. Both are subjects of endless writings, and you get the sense as you approach your visits that you're going to be disappointed. They can't possibly live up to all the over-enthusiastic gushing. But when you finally reach them, they leave you in awe anyway.

The mangosteen's accolades are deserved. First, it is a beautiful fruit, maybe the most so. Ranging from apricot-to peach-sized, the mangosteen is a deep, eggplant-purple ball, with a green stem on top. To open, you just score along the mangosteen's equator, and remove one half of the shell, revealing inside the translucent, velvety white flesh. This is the edible part, and you can either scoop it out with a spoon, or just bite into it.

The mangosteen has a sublime flavor that is hard to compare to anything - there are definitely hints of very sweet tangerine, but much milder and more interesting. It has a smooth, satiny texture that bursts with juice when you bite into it. It actually seems to change flavor as you chew, starting off sweet, and then metamorphizing into a crunchy tartness before you reach the small pit. When we first tasted the mangosteen, our reaction was a unified, 'wow'.

The actual edible fruit is pretty small, so it's very easy to munch through kilograms of these. In Singapore, after consuming probably 4 kilos in our hotel room, we bought two or three kilos on the way home, and ate them all while sitting in the airport. In Hong Kong, I found them at a street fruit market that was closing on the first day we were there. The vendor said I could have everything left in the box for $20 HKD - about $3. So I took a big bag of them, and then found another closing stand on the way back to the hotel who offered me the exact same deal. So I bought those too. And we had no problem tearing through all of them, mostly while sitting on the floor of the hotel room in Hong Kong while Nicky slept.

They were only just coming into season in the Philippines (finally) as we were leaving, local ones from Mindanao costing about $7/kg at the market. We bought a few kilos our last weekend there and savored each one.

Santol

With many tropical fruits we've tried, you kind of have to let yourself acquire the taste. At first, they're kind of strange and unfamiliar. You might not try it again for a while. Then you see a huge pile at a roadside stand selling cheap, and you think, 'yeah, those were ok, let's buy some'. Then you get to a point where you consume all those you just bought in one sitting, and find yourself plotting where to find more so late at night.

This is one of those fruits. Consuming it, the santol is less of an 'eating fruit' experience and more like a 'binge on candy' experience. You cut in half these yellow-orange, tennis-ball sized fruits, and find these transluscent, juicy white flesh-covered seeds in the middle, surrounded by a thick rubbery skin. You clamp out the seeds with your teeth, and then slosh it around in your mouth for a few minutes, sucking off the fibrous flesh. So you're not really actually eating very much, and a kilo of santols might net you a few hundred grams of fruit. 

But the flesh itself is so delicious and unique, it's worth the effort. A good santol has an intensely sweet-sour flavor, the acid so pervasive it almost makes you cringe like when you taste a lemon. But at the same time, it's so sweet and fruity, you plow right through the acid - much like eating a handfull of sweettarts. It's hard to compare the actual fruit flavor to something familiar - it's slightly lemon like, slightly grapefruit, but at the same time much more floral and complex. 

There's also an element of danger involved. The seeds themselves are hard with sharp edges. Whie big, they are indigestible. Apparently if you do swallow them - not something that would be easy to do accidentally, to be sure - you will need emergency surgery to remove them to prevent them from ripping up your intestines. So in addition to the flavor, there's that adventurous blowfish angle as well.

We tried a few of these when we first arrived in Manila, and then kind of ignored them until a couple months later when I guess they really came into season. Seeing so many at the market, we bought a bunch. And while the fruits themselves are tennis- or even softball-sized, the edible portion is so small that you don't even notice going through a few kilos at a time, which is really easy to do, since the taste is so insanely addictive. Once you start with these, it's hard to stop.

Lanzone

I first tried this fruit in Laos last year, thinking it was a longan, which looks very similar. I thought it tasted different, but thought it might be just a different variety.

In fact, it's a different fruit. Visibly, while the fruits are similar sized, the lanzone has a lighter beige skin, and grows on the branch in clusters, whereas longans seem to grow individually. Both, however, are great fruits.

Here in the Philippines, lanzones are apparently both popular and highly valued. We visited Camiguin island in July, and found out that the island - despite its tourist-brochure beaches and scenery - is most famous in Philippines for its lanzones, and they even have a festival celebrating the abundance of the fruit in October to which many flock. In the Salcedo Saturday Market, about a block from our apartment and where we do most of our fruit shopping, they've been selling lanzones imported from Thailand there since May for a whopping $12/kilo. We passed. Only now, in September, have local lanzones started to appear, and today we bought some for about $4/kilo.

We did, however, eat these on our visit to Singapore in late July, where they were apparently in season and very cheap. We gorged ourselves, along with the mangosteens and rambutans we found at the Chinatown market, all under $3/kilo. Lanzones are a bit challenging to eat - you have to peel off the skin, which can be tedious if you don't get it right on a seam, and it makes your fingers very sticky in a way that scrubbing with soap and water for 5 minutes only barely removes the residue. But it's a small price to pay.

Unlike other fruits here which have very unique taste which are often difficult to describe in words, the lanzone is very easy: it tastes like a light, mild, sweet grapefruit. If you like grapefruit, you'll love lanzones - they're sweeter, have none of the acidic or bitter undertones of grapefruit, and have a soft, mellow texture that's a bit like a grape, but not as firm. The only thing preventing one from eating kilos at a time is the difficulty in opening them.

Atis

This is another fruit with an acquired taste that I'll miss after leaving. In the Philippines, it's called 'atis', but this is grown throughout the tropics globally and is called 'sugar apple' or 'custard apple' elsewhere. It's a relative of the soursop, on which I posted earlier.

Like many fruits here, these have a very short window of edibility. If you've ever wondered why more exotic fruits don't show up in US supermarkets, the answer become pretty clear when you go shopping here. We typically go to the market on Saturday and with wide eyes, fill up several shopping bags with fruit. By Tuesday or Wednesday, anything we haven't eaten is bound to have spoiled. It's frustrating to have to throw away a third or more of what you've bought by midway through the week.

The atis fits squarely within that category. I think the first time we tried these when they first came into season in June, we waited a day too long. We opened them up and inside, it was dry a browning. But we gave them another try later - and now there's piles of them at the market - and while it's been hard to convince Lena to give it a second chance, I am now downing a couple of these a day easy.

It's a strange looking fruit - with green, tiled-roof-like scales. It's not immediately obvious how you eat one of these things. When you buy them, they're firm, so are you supposed to cut them open, peel off the skin, bite right in? Turns out, when they ripen and become ready to eat, they soften enough that if you squeeze a little, you can just break it in half with your hand. Inside, there's a sticky white flesh, speckled by many, many hard black seeds slightly bigger and shinier than watermelon seeds. It's not pretty like some fruits here - honestly, it looks kind of like in a sci-fi movie, when they open up an alen for surgery.

So, the atis is not super easy to eat. The only way I've figured out - and this is after some searching online to verify - is to take a teaspoon, and one scoop at a time, lift out the flesh. It doesn't taste like a fruit. It tastes more like a dessert - like a grittier version of a panna cotta, or a rice pudding. There's a distinct, but very mild licorice flavor that gives character to the sweetness, and it has a tinge of that floral, tropical flavor - like lemon or pineapple - that many fruits have here to one degree or another. There's also the seeds. You're basically sucking the flesh off of the seeds with each spoonfull, and you have to eat this with some sort of receptacle nearby in order to spit out the many, many seeds. Makes you feel kind of like you're chewing tobacco.

But I've really grown to like this fruit, and now buy it every time I go shopping. I've learned not to buy that many, because you're lucky if you get one or two days of ripeness out of these before they degenerate into a black, smelly mass. 

Spanish plum

These are called "siniguelas" here in the Philippines, and I'd never seen or heard of them before arriving. They were in season when we arrived in May, but we haven't seen them in the market for the last few months.

Spanish plums taste pretty similar to their English namesake - a sweet and bright, but slightly tart flavor, and a crunchy-when-ripe texture. They're about the size of a walnut in the shell, and have a green to purple color. The seed is bigger than that of a plum, so when you pop it in your mouth, you just kind of work off the thin layer of flesh, then discard the pit when you figure you're done.

When we arrived, these were plentiful and cheap, so I bought a lot. They're the kind of fruit that's really easy to eat while you sit in front of a computer working. Very little effort or preparation, the only thing you need is a place to put the pits.

Dragonfruit

This is definitely one of the prettiest fruits there is. It's a vivid pink with little green flaps, and about the size of a big apple, though a little heavier. Cut it open, and it's a brilliant white with lots of tiny black specks. There's another variety here that's a beet-purple on the inside. You can occasionally find these in asian supermarkets in the States, and I've bought them a few times, always to be far more satisfied with its appearance than its taste. There, and frequently here - if you get a dragonfruit that's not quite perfect, it has the texture of a soggy unripe honeydew melon, and it totally flavorless. 

Having tried them before, when I saw them here, I wasn't that enthusiastic, but bought one early on and was disappointed as usual. Hard to believe such a beautiful creation could be so bland. When the red version appeared, tried that too, another experiment ending in failure. But recently, these came into prime season here, and there were stacks for sale on our way back from a weekend at the beach. So, we bought a couple just to see.

Perseverance was rewarded. Apparently just-picked ripe dragonfruits are the only kind worth eating. The flavor is still mild, but it's a gentle, fresh, juicy sweetness with the texture of a crunchy cucumber. Easily went through the couple we bought, and then put half of another one in the freezer before we went away for a weekend. When I discovered it there a couple weeks later, i was able to spoon out the flesh and it was like a dragonfruit sorbet. This isn't a fruit I'll terribly miss, but I can finally understand why they're so ubiquitous in the region.