Ravings of a Textual Deviant

So, being me, I had to try out the strange fruit I found yesterday. My mom, from whom I have inherited my intrepid spirit (among other things best left unmentioned), was also game.

But first, I had to do some googling for recipes. Not much luck, I’m afraid. So I decided to just cut the thing open and dig in. If you’re going to try this at home, be careful. It’s tricky to get the darn things to hold still while you cut them open. There was almost an Incident Involving a Sharp Object. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, but a sitcomesque scene in the emergency room did. Fortunately, my reflexes are still fairly good.

Anyway, I get the KiwanoTM (the name “Kiwano” is a registered trademark of the company that imports them from New Zealand) open and it looks more or less like the picture I found on the web. Being forewarned, I was prepared to scoop out the seeds and nibble the fruity bits off the kernel.

Easier said than done.

The fruity bits have the consistency of warm jelly, and yet somehow manage to cling to the tiny seeds with a stubbornness not often encountered in food that’s already dead. I tried nibbling the fruit off the seed, which was maddeningly slow. Then I tried sieving the fruit off the seed, which is kind of like vacuuming up Jell-O. I did manage to get a bit of juice out of it, and I think that if I wanted that KiwanoTM experience again, I’d probably just go for bottled juice. It’s just too messy any other way.

As for the taste…it’s sharp in a sort of citrusy way, and tropical-fruity, but not sweet. Mom suggested a “tart banana,” which is reasonably close. Maybe with a bit of kiwi fruit thrown in the mix. I can understand why most of the recipes I saw involved adding it to a fruit salad; it would probably go very well with starfruit. My final experiment was to take the small amount of extracted juice and try it with some vodka.

Neither Mom nor I could even decide if we liked the taste. On the other hand, neither one of us dislikes it either. These things taste as strange as they look.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 18th, 2004 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Tales from the Kitchen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.