Fruit Hunter!

Ajax has been pretty rainy and overcast lately, so when I saw the sun shining on Thursday, I decided to take a walk to the local Sobey's to see if they had anything interesting.

 

 

I looked around for a bit, and the only fruit I could find that I had never had was granadilla. I did a quick google search to learn a bit about it, and found that it looked similar to a dragonfruit or pomegranate on the inside (large seeds surrounded by pockets of fruit). Remembering my dragonfruit smoothie failure, I decided to try and find something at a different store. I still bought the granadilla though, just to give it a chance.

 

Next, I went to a local market called EZ Fresh. It has a lot of Asian foods, and there was a great many ingredients I had never heard of or tasted before. This is the main reason I decided to check it out. As soon as I walked to the produce section, I could smell a strong, pineapple-like, tropical sort of scent, and pinpointed it as coming from a huge weird looking...thing (at the time I didn't know what I was looking at). It turned out to be a jackfruit, and they were really big so I just bought a portion that had already been cut.

 

Jackfruits (Artocarpus heterophyllus), grow on trees in tropical lowlands, and they can reach a massive size, up to 80 pounds in weight. They are a major part of agriculture in India, as they have been for centuries, while in other areas, such as parts of Brazil, it is considered an invasive species. It is also the national fruit of Bangladesh.

 

The main reason I chose this fruit was the smell. It has a very strong tropical smell that reminds me of pineapple. The outside is kind of rough, and the inside is very fibrous, with pockets of fruit separated by the fibers. Each pocket has a large seed in the middle, which you can apparently roast and eat as a snack (I have yet to try this). The flavor reminds me of pineapple mixed with mango and apple, but the texture is more like that of a cantaloupe or honeydew melon. I'm not sure how juicy they are supposed to be, because this one wasn't very, but it was delicious all the same. I can still smell the scent on my hands as I type this half an hour later.

 

In my opinion, no cooking was needed, since it was so tasty to begin with, but there is a dish called Ginataang Langka that is made from unripened jackfruit cooked in coconut milk. It consists of the fruit, stewed in coconut milk with onion, garlic, shrimp paste, and long chili peppers, as well as meat (quite often pork). I'm not sure about cooking the ripened fruit, although I'm sure it would work as well on the grill as pineapple, and as I mentioned before, the seeds can also be cooked and eaten. We've all heard the saying "don't judge a book by its cover," well the same can be said for fruit. The jackfruit looks pretty ugly and unappetizing at first glance, but all it takes is one whiff to know its going to be delicious.

 

 

Work Cited:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackfruit

Sensory Evaluation

Over the next few months I'm going to try as many new foods as I can and record them in this blog. I decided to start off with something I was pretty sure I would enjoy, so I chose a fruit. Sweet pitaya, to be exact, or as it is better known (at least by me), Dragon fruit. I had never heard the name sweet pitaya before, but learned a decent amount about the fruit on the internet before eating it.

 

I also didn't realize how many different varieties there were. I've only ever seen the red-skinned, white-fleshed kind, Hylocereus undatus, which is the most common type. But the two I purchased at Sobey's (for a whopping $3.50 each) were the red-fleshed type, Hylocereus costaricensis. It's pretty amazing that we live in a time where we can get any type of fruit from any part of the planet regardless of what season it is just by driving 5 minutes to the store. At the same time its a slightly sobering thought if you consider how much fossil fuel gets burned during shipping. More energy wasted than the caloric content of the food can even provide. Just another reason to buy local!

 

Honestly, I don't think it was worth the price. Sure it looked nice, with its red leathery skin and some leaves sort of like flower petals, and when I cut it in half it was quite juicy too, but my excitement was short lived. It did taste good, it just didn't really taste like much of anything. I ate a couple pieces and it might be a stretch, but I would have to say it reminded me of a cross between a kiwi (because of the seeds and a slight tartness in the beginning), and a watermelon (because of the watery-sweetness). I also thought I was picking up a slight aftertaste of some sort of red berry. The seeds were kind of off-putting since they were much larger than kiwi seeds so I decided to blend it up with some apple cider and strain the seeds. Bad idea. For some reason it became this weird goopy substance that reminded me of egg whites and I couldn't even get it to go through the strainer. I decided to just drink it as it was, but the texture made me gag so I poured it out. I will have to research a recipe containing Dragon fruit to use up the second one I bought. I don't see myself buying them again however.