adventures in fruit

Grilled Apricots

2009-07-10T23:14:00.000-07:00

Apricots grill nicely, because even a lot of heat and smoke won’t overwhelm their natural tanginess. And they have enough moisture that you can’t really burn them.

I put them right over the coals, at a low to medium heat, for a few minutes, turning once. I usually sprinkle a bit of brown sugar over them first. The sugar will burn, but that’s part of the flavor profile.

Grilling an apricot even has the ability to turn a mediocre grocery store apricot into something truly special!

The perfect accompaniment is a chilled glass of Tokaji desser wine. Tokaji is the famous dessert wine of Hungary, with noble rot concentrating the sweet tanginess of the grapes and producing distinct apricot notes with a little bit of herbal undertone.

It is the perfect late spring/early summer dessert for a grilled meal.

eating fruit and the evolution of intelligence

2009-06-10T22:36:00.000-07:00

This news story about chimps and fruit is, well, profound.

Chimpanzees remember the exact location of all their favourite fruit trees. Their spatial memory is so precise that they can find a single tree among more than 12,000 others within a patch of forest, primatologists have found….Acquiring such an ability may have helped drive the evolution of sophisticated primate brains.

Emmanuelle Normand and Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany teamed up with Simone Ban of the University of Cocody in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire to investigate the spatial memory of chimpanzees in the wild.

"We were amazed by the apparent easiness by which chimpanzees discover highly productive fruit trees. Or how after being separated from other group members for hours or days, they could join each other silently at a large fruit tree, like if they would have had an appointment at this place," says Normand.

Remarkably, as well as remembering the location of their favourite trees, the chimps also recalled when each tree would be in season, producing the most fruit. They would then often walk further to reach these more bountiful trees rather than make a shorter journey to a less productive one.

I can relate to this. I still remember the exact location and appearance of fruit trees I ate from decades ago. Is that my chimp brain at work? Apparently so:

In one respect, it is not surprising that chimpanzees have developed an
outstanding ability to navigate their home range, says Normand.

One idea, known as the 'ecological hypothesis' proposes that the need to remember
and find food resources, such as fruit trees, could have driven the evolution of
primate brains. In particular, it says that a preference for fruit eating, or frugivory, would select for intelligence compared to leaf-eating, or foliovory.

"That's because the distribution of fruits is more scattered, less predictable and fruits can be more difficult to manipulate than leaves, the nut cracking by Ta chimpanzees being an extreme example," says Normand.

Compared to monkeys, chimpanzees live in larger territories and are highly frugivorous, suggesting that developing an outstanding ability to navigate to fruit trees could have a key driver in the evolution of ape intelligence.

Frugivory! What a word! Maybe I’ll have to change the name of this blog.

And it sure is nice to know that eating fruit made us all smarter.

Source:
Chimps mentally map fruit trees, by Matt Walker
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8086000/8086246.stm

mango season

2009-05-10T21:53:00.000-07:00

A nice feature of Los Angeles is the many enterprising fruit sellers positioned around the neighborhoods:

At this time of year they sell good mangos. Not those softball sized green and red things that usually aren’t as good as you think they should be, and seem to have no season. I’m referring to the smaller, yellow, sort of paisley-shaped flattish mangos that are both seasonal and delicious:

They are usually called manila mangos, but they go by many other names too. And although the aren’t exactly local, they really don’t travel too far compared to many other fruits. The ones we get in L.A. often come from the Ciudad Obregon region of Sonora Desert long the Gulf of California, several hundred miles away.

They are the best mangos, but you kind of have to search them out. If you buy them by the case when they’re in season they are not too expensive.

And the boxes have useful info, too. Check this one out:

exotic European fruit

2009-04-19T23:04:00.000-07:00

There is a springtime fruit that almost every European knows but few Americans know, which is surprising since the climates are so similar.

The fruit is a currant.

It has a refreshing tartness, and it probably is the first fruit to ripen in most of Europe after the spring thaw. It is native to Europe and grows wild in all kinds of environments, including alongside train tracks.

I was lucky enough to be in Paris the other day where I bought some at a street market. It was I think the only locally grown fresh fruit on offer. Everything else came from the tropics or the southern hemisphere.

So it set me wondering why it is so rare in the U.S. I was surprised to read in Wikipedia that currants were once popular in the U.S., but currant farming was banned about 100 years ago when it was discovered that the bushes were a host of white pine blister rust, which damages north American pine forests. So there aren’t any domestic currants. And I guess they just aren’t good enough to be a common import. I have occasionally seen them at expense grocery stores, but not often.

So if you’re in Europe this time of year, enjoy an exotic fruit!

when god invented candy, I think it was because kumquats were out of season

2009-01-30T22:11:00.000-08:00

For years I didn't know how to eat a kumquat. Then a Chinese friend told me to eat the whole thing, all at once.

Wow is that a flavor explosion!

If you haven't done it, try it. Put a whole kumquat in your mouth, chew it up, and swallow. You won't forget it, and you won't regret it.

Can you think of a better candy?

A nice way to eat a persimmon

2008-12-31T13:28:00.000-08:00

1. Start with a soft ripe hachiya persimmon
2. Slice the top off with a sharp knife (you'll probably need to pull hard on the stem to get it to come out)
3. Cup your hand to hold the fruit, open end facing up
4. Pour heavy cream into the fruit
5. eat spoonfuls of the flesh and the cream

This is the most luxurious fresh fruit experience I know of.

Tejocote

2008-11-29T23:42:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite things is discovering fruits that I've never seen before.
Last week I discovered something new at a farmers market in the San Joaquin valley of California.

Most of the vendors and customers at this market are Mexican and not much English is spoken. Amongst the varieties of cactus fruit and persimmons for sale I found a small orange fruit called Tejocote. I suspect the name is a Nahuatl word. The woman I purchased them from told me not to eat them out of hand, but said they are used to make a punch for Christmas and New Year's.

Of course I ate one out of hand anyway. It is a fragrant fruit, with citrus-like notes, and a flavour a bit like apricot, but a pithy flesh and a large pit. The flavour is fresh and pleasant, but bitter. I can see why she recommended not eating it out of hand, but I can imagine the punch is nice. I wonder where I can get some?

There is a lot more info on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crataegus_pubescens

good grapes have seeds

2008-10-12T22:13:00.000-07:00

Grape season is coming to a close in California. This year I realized that I really only want to buy grapes with seeds, just like I only want to buy raw milk cheese. The taste is just exponentially better.

Seedless grapes are like the polyester of fruit. They aren’t natural, and they’re not very enjoyable either. If you shop at super markets where the only choice is seedless grapes, then get to a farmers market where you can buy grapes with seeds. Don’t be afraid of the little seed, it is a small inconvenience to bear in exchange for the wonderfully rich flavor of a good grape.

Grilled Cherries!

2008-05-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

I discovered the wonders of grilled fruit several years ago and I've been experimenting with fruit on the barbie ever since. Grilled cherries are one of my favorites and in Southern California the season is peaking right now, so it is easy to find well-ripened inexpensive and delicious cherries.

Grilled cherries dipped in chocolate is the perfect primal haute cuisine finish to a late spring/early summer cookout. You can put the ingredients on the grill while you're eating dinner and the coals are cooling down, and the cherries should be perfectly cooked by the time you're ready for desert.

This recipe is simple and delicious. Start with a bunch of dark ripe cherries, with the stems on. Put them in an open foil pouch, and put the pouch directly over the coals. Do the same with a bar of dark chocolate, broken into chunks. The darker the chocolate the better. You can use just half a bar if you're only serving a couple of people. As the cherries cook the flavours concentrate and they develop a wonderful cherry pie/maraschino cherry flavour. If you leave the chocolate on too long it will burn, but just a slight burn is nice, the bittersweet flavour of baked chocolate cake combined with some smokiness from the smoldering embers, is a great counterpart to the sweet cherries. Chocolate has a natural smokiness from the roasting process so you're really just augmenting flavours that were already there.

After about 20 minutes of low heat the cherries should be warm and slightly cooked. The chocolate will take less time.

Dip the cherries in the chocolate and eat! That's it.

My friend Mike Levy deserves credit for the suggestion of serving a glass of port with this desert. It really is an amazing accompaniment. There are complimentary flavours of both the chocolate and the cherries in the port, and the wine creates a nice bridge between the two components.

StreetFruit: Loquats

2008-04-29T14:37:00.000-07:00

There is a surprising variety of free fruit available in Los Angeles, where I live. Lots of fruit trees grow in parks, in back yards overhanging alleys, and other places where the public may get a free snack. An organization called fallen fruit http://www.fallenfruit.org/index.html which asserts that fruit growing in, or overhanging an alley, street, or sidewalk is in public space and may be picked by the public. I don't know what the law says, but that sounds like good common sense to me.

Because of L.A.'s climate some of the street fruit here is more unusual than what you can buy in stores. Like the loquat. Loquats grow well in California, but they are still relatively uncommon. They don't keep well, and they're a bit difficult to eat, so you won't find them in stores, at least not in the U.S. I have seen them at farmers markets and at fruit stands in Europe.

Loquats have a nice refreshing taste. They tend to be juicy and wet, although the thin flesh relative to the large pit means that you never seem to get a satisfying mouthful. The flavor is like a very mild apricot crossed with a longan.

Here's a tree on 3rd St. in L.A. with plenty of fruit hanging over the sidewalk.

Tzapotl: One name, many fruits

2008-03-24T22:08:00.000-07:00

I've wondered why three seemingly unrelated fruits have related names: the white sapote, black sapote, and mamey sapote.

I found out the answer earlier this month when I visited the Fairchild Botanical Garden in Miami. I was lucky to visit when they had their fruit stand open, with produce from the garden's farm in Homestead.

John Mario was running the fruit stand and he's very knowledgeable about tropical fruits. He explained the origin of the name: sapote comes from the nahuatl word tzapotl, meaning a soft edible fruit. Apparently the name has been applied to many many fruits which are not botanically related, but all originated in Mexico or Central America.

Here's a picture of a nicely ripened black sapote I bought at Fairchild:

The black sapote is related to the persimmon. You can see a bit of the resemblance in the presence of the thingy where the stem attaches to the fruit - I think it's called an involucre.

I had never eaten a black sapote before, and it was excellent. John Mario told me some people call it the chocolate pudding fruit, which makes sense. Inside the slightly stiff green skin is a soft, black flesh, slightly sweet and definitely exotic. It had a nice mild coffee aftertaste. It's worth trying, if you can find one.

A fruit with no name

2008-03-04T23:01:00.000-08:00

This is the fruit of a plant in the genus Puya. Botanically it is distantly related to the pineapple, and with a little bit of imagination maybe you can see the resemblance.

I was introduced to this fruit by an acquaintance who told me it grows on his property in San Diego county. He was fairly certain of the genus but he didn't know what the fruit is called. I've done a bit of googling and haven't been able to figure out exactly what it is.

This fruit was almost as large as a basketball. You can break it or cut it into sections, each section containing a pithy but juicy flesh surrounding a large pit.

The flesh is edible. I ate it. It was vaguely pineapple-like, but not as acidic. The flavour was fairly bland, with hints of banana and bubble gum. It tasted similar to bland tropical fruits I've eaten. If I was hungry I would have eaten more. But the flavour was not memorable or enticing, and I'm not surprised that I've never heard of this fruit before.

Even so, after millenia of humans tasting and consuming probably everything edible under the sun you would think that somebody somewhere at sometime must have eaten and named this fruit. If you know what it is please leave a comment.

An extremely ripe persimmon!

2008-02-15T11:08:00.000-08:00

Not bad, good.

You might think that mid-February is a little late to be eating persimmons. I thought so too until I tried it.

I picked a lot of hachiya persimmons off a tree in my aunt's front yard in the San Joaquin valley (California) at Thanksgiving, and they've been ripening and aging on my balcony in Los Angeles ever since, nearly 3 months now.

They reached a nice, soft, edible ripeness in the middle of December. But I noticed from the ones I ate in early January that they were still getting better and better.

The picture above is of a persimmon I ate a couple of days ago. It was one of the best I have ever had in my life.

A mexican girlfriend I had many years ago said that the best persimmons were the ones you picked up off the ground. I didn't believe her until I ate these 2 1/2 month old persimmons carefully ripened and aged on my balcony. Now I think she knew what she was talking about. I've never seen persimmons in Mexico, but maybe that's another blog post.

The flavor of this persimmon was incredible. It had the usual sweet, spicy, cinnamon and tea flavors you get from any ripe persimmon, though it had perhaps mellowed a little. It had also developed a wonderfully sensuous creaminess. But best of all was this incredible burnt toffee flavour that came through in parts of the fruit (especially the slightly darker part that you see in the photo above).

So my advice to you is the next time you get a hachiya persimmon let it ripen. Outside. For a long time.

I suspect the alternating cold nights and mild days of a Los Angeles winter must have something to do with the amazing flavour this fruit developed. Some of the other persimmons on my balcony have now started to go bad. But I think that is often when fruit is at its best - right on the edge between ripe and spoiled.

You can't buy fruit like this in stores!