'Exotic Tropical Fruits' category has grown to a new blog

One of my greatest passions is Exotic Tropical Fruits. I've been talking about it for quite awhile here and it has proven to be one of the most popular topics on my blog. Therefore I've decided to move to another stage of blogging and create another blog that is entirely devoted to fruits. I called it FruitsKings and there I will be talking about everything and anything related to fruits. You are welcome to visit it and give me your suggestions and comments!
See you there!

Another exotic tropical fruit - Tangerine

Tangerines are my choice to put in a lunch box. I peel them and put them in a plastic container. It's quick and easy snack when you are hungry.
It tastes like an orange, but sweeter. One thing that I like about it is that it's segmented and small compared to other citrus fruits. It's a bite size.

They are easier to peel compared to other citrus fruits and are sometimes called “easy peelers". Tangerines are full of vitamin C and fiber and one tangerine has half the vitamin C you need for the whole day.

Another exotic tropical fruit - Dates

The reason why I am talking about dates today is the fact is that Christmas is approaching and date squares is my favorite treats to bake. I also like to eat dry dates just as they are. Be cautious not to overeat them though because they are very high in sugar. That means adding extra pounds!

Here's a nice dates squares recipe: 

And that's how they grow on a tree! Most people dot even know that they grow on a palm.

Another exotic tropical fruit - Tamarind

 One of the most fascinating things about this fruit is its taste. It tastes very  sweet and sour and that's why it's used a lot in sweet and sour dishes, especially by the Chinese people.
The best way to enjoy the fruit is to make the fresh juice out of it, which is not easy to do, but worth it.
For myself, I buy it already made by Goya. They make really good drinks. The juice is not expensive, easy to find in any grocery store and it's a practical way to try a new fruit anyway.
In the tropics you can find this drink on the beaches a lot. Many sun worshipers appreciate the cool-crisp refreshing taste.  

Tamarind tree is humongous, but can vary in size depending on location and its age.

Another exotic tropical fruit - Lychee

The lychee fruit is a size of a big grape. When you peel off the skin, you can see the white or pinkish juicy flesh of a lychee fruit. It's very sweet and has afresh taste.
The texture of its flesh is similar to a grape. The fruit is rich with Vitamin C and Potassium.

This is the how I was introduced to lychee - someone just cracked a branch full of fruits and gave it to me. So, this was my first experience with the fruit. At that time i didn't even know how to eat the fruits, so the farmer that gave me the branch had to show me. He took the fruit, and put it in his mouth in-between his teeth and gently cracked the hard skin. As the skin broke, the white fruit came out and he told me to eat it. And it was fabulous!!!

Another exotic tropical fruit - Persimmon

Persimmon - just looking at this picture of persimmon I am almost drooling because I know how sweet and delicious it tastes.
In wikipedia they describe it this way (and it really says it all):
The Date-plum (Diospyros lotus) is native to southwest Asia and southeast Europe. It was known to the ancient Greeks as "the fruit of the gods", or often referred to as "nature's candy" i.e. Dios pyros (lit. "the wheat of Zeus"), hence the scientific name of the genus. ItsEnglish name probably derives from Persian Khormaloo خرمالو literally "Date-Plum", referring to the taste of this fruit which is reminiscent of both plums anddates. This species is one candidate for the lotus mentioned in the Odyssey: it was so delicious that those who ate it forgot about returning home and wanted to stay and eat lotus with the lotus-eaters.^[7] The fruit is also known as 'Amlok' or 'Japani Phal' in Pakistan.

When the tree produces fruits there are almost no leaves left on the tree, it looks naked.

Another exotic tropical fruit - Fig

I like figs because they are available almost daily in Canada. It has a very different taste from our usual fruits.
I like to eat it raw and I use it very often in a fruit salad. It gives a pop of color and life to your fruit salad.
Figs are very good for your health because they have a lot of calcium and fiber in them.
The dry figs are available all year round and everywhere. Most of the time they are used in bakery.

This is a fig fruit that is ready to be picked.

And that's how the fig tree looks like.

Another Exotic Fruit - Pitaya (Dragon Fruit)

I learnt about this fruit when I went on a trip to St. Thomas, US Virgin Island. At the hotel I was staying they had an exotic fruit tasting and that was the only fruit that was not growing on the island. Because it was the only fruit I've never tasted it got my attention and OMG I was in for a surprise!
It tastes something like in-between kiwi and pear and its flesh is very soft and juicy. The seed are really small and barely noticeable.
A very interesting fact about this fruit is that its tree belong to the cactus family.
Here what it looks like:

And that's how it looks when cut and that's exactly how I eat it!

Another Exotic Fruit - Banana!

Banana is the most commercial fruit there is. It's very common and it's eaten all over the world in so many different varieties and here is the post of just the banana kinds in Hawaii:

This is just to tell you about the magnitude of the species. In this poster there's only bananas that are endemic to this island. Therefore, imagine how extended this genre is!

Here's a DOLE video on banana harvesting:

Another Exotic Fruit - Grapefruit

Grapefruit is one of my favorite fruits to eat fresh.
When I started my bed & breakfast in Puerto Rico, the existing building was right next to this humongous grapefruit tree. We built a balcony next to it so in the morning I would wake up and literally walk 3-4 ft and I could pick my own grapefruit right there. It was a size of a bowling ball. They were so sweet that they tasted more like oranges, rather then grapefruits. There was no bitterness at all.

The tree is still there healthy and producing and it almost looks like this.

By the way, if the fruit is really sweet and ripe, the seed inside starts germinating and growing into a small plant inside of the fruit itself. I find it a very interesting phenomenon and it looks like this.

Another Exotic Fruit - "Funky-Smelling" Durian

This fruit has its special status. I've been avoiding talking about it for the longest time, because I didn't know how to approach it. It's main characteristic is a very specific smell that stinks! Wikipedia explains it as the smell that  evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust, and has been described variously as almonds, rotten onions, turpentine and gym socks. The odour has led to the fruit's banishment from certain hotels and public transportation in southeast Asia.
But the taste is incredible and worth trying! Unfortunately, in Canada it is rarely available...

Another tropical fruit - Kumquat or Cumquat

I discovered kumquat for the first time when I went to Costa Rica. Soon after discovering this fruit I started making jam out of it. Most of all I like the texture of the jam - the fruit`s skin stays firm and makes a nice mixture with its flesh. The flesh of the fruit separate from the skin makes it very different and unique jam texture.

The way I used to make my jam was with kumquat, white sugar, pectin, lemon and, of course, water. It has been a long time since I cooked kumquat jam. I think it was in Puerto Rico, because a friend of mine used to own a tree and we`d do exchange - fruits for jam. But it`s very costly in Canada; it`s also the fact that it`s not available at the market all the time.

Another Exotic Fruit - Jackfruit

The Jackfruit is the biggest fruit in the world. It was brought from India and often confused with Dorian (the smelly one), but it's not. Though it does have slightly unpleasant smell, the taste outweighs the drawback. The yellowish soft and flaky sweet pulp is eaten raw, boiled or fried. The large white seeds are also good roasted tasting something like chestnuts.
The tree grows to a height of 50 ft. Its fruits are very unusual and they weight up to 70 pounds each and are up to 3 ft long. They are borne all along the trunk of the tree.

Another Exotic Fruit - Breadnut

In my last post I was talking about breadfruit and I compared it to breadnut as they look very similar. Now I will elaborate more on the breadnut.
Breadnut fruit is slightly different from the breadfruit. It has seeds inside and they are the size of a cherry. The fresh seeds can be cooked and eaten or can be set out to dry in the sun to roast and eaten later.

Stewed nut tastes like mashed potato, roasted it tastes like chocolate or coffee and can be prepared in numerous other dishes. The meat itself is very similar to the breadfruit, but it cannot be easily mashed because of the seeds inside.
So, this fruit is not for the flesh, rather it's for the seeds. I will be posting more on this in future because it's a fruit that is not known much and its nutrient value is still a mystery and being researched by scientists.

Another Exotic Fruit - Breadfruit

It took me awhile to really spot breadfruit tree and differentiate it from the breadnut tree. And the only way to see the difference is by picking the fruit or looking at the tree closely.
This is how the breadfruit fruit looks like:

So, as you can see the breadfruit is quite smooth, though still a bit bumpy and it doesn't have spikes. It's also seedless and that's another big difference between the breadfruit and the breadnut.
Eaten fried, roasted, or boiled the fruit is high in carbohydrates and a source of Vitamins A, B, C. This fruit was brought over from Africa to feed the slaves in the sugar cane plantations. As for how it came to the Caribbean - it was Captain Bligh. It was introduced into the West Indies in 1793 from Tahiti. Captain Bligh in the ship Providence, brought plans to St-Vincent and Jamaica after an early attempt failed aboard the mutiny ship Bounty in 1789. It spread very quickly all over the Caribbean because of the high carbohydrates contents as well as its cheap price and high nutrition.
The taste of this fruit is similar to sweet white mashed potatoes, but it's sweeter and has a consistency of pudding.

Another Exotic Fruit - Coconut

 

Coconut is one of the most economically valuable fruits because of various ways of making products out of it. It can be used to make coconut oil, coconut milk, coconut cream, even the bark can be used as lumber, etc.
For myself one of the most fascinating things is the fact that coconut is a seed. It's the biggest seed there is. And the tree is reproduced inside the coconut itself, so this is one of the reasons that coconut trees are growing all over the world.
A coconut shell would just fall off the tree into the ocean and then would be spread through the water to other places on earth, where it would germinate and grow itself to a new environments as long as the weather is warm.

Another Exotic Fruit - Star fruit or Carambola

The Star Fruit is more suitable for presentation, rather than eating. It looks very fresh and I always use to decorate salads with it. Its shape makes it look like stars, which is unconventional and appealing.
Although the fruit is completely edible with its waxy skin, the flesh is quite crunchy and very juicy, which makes it suitable for pressing it to make fresh juice. The texture is similar in consistency to grapes when ripe and feels like pepper when still green.

Carambolas are best eaten when ripe - when they are yellow with a light shade of green. They will also have brown ridges at the five edges and feel firm.
As I mentioned earlier I used it mostly for decoration. Sometimes I would just put them in a crystal bowl by themselves.

Another Exotic Fruit - Mamey

I used to grow Mamey trees when I lived in Puerto Rico. I bought the seed and planted it outside my house. I started from the pot and then switched it to the ground. It took it 3-4 month to grow in the pot first. It's easier to transplant it to the ground when the root system is already strong enough and a bit bigger than the pot itself.

It took the tree around 2-3 years to grow into a big tree and give fruits. The fruit itself takes around 6 month to become ripe and ready to pick. To know that it's ripe you have to scratch the skin of the fruit with ease and it has to be soft and orangy.
The pulp of the fruits tastes like papaya. It's tender and has very nice aroma. Normally we'd eat the fruit fresh just spooning the pulp out.

Natural Phenomenon - The effects of a hurricane on exotic fruit trees

We all still have the bitter after-flavor of the Hurricane Irene . It had devastating consequences in many places and one of the first places to be hit was Puerto Rico. It happened on 22nd of August, 2011 and at that time it was still a tropical storm.
Puerto Rico has a very strong hurricane building code, that's why the buildings don't get damaged much (they can sustain up to 150 km/hour), but the main things that suffer are vegetation and infrastructure. Apart from electricity lines and other things being destroyed, one of the most overwhelming damages is the fruit trees that are ruined by hurricanes.
During a hurricane constant gust shakes the trees. Heavy rains turn soil into mush, which makes it even easier for the wind to shake the tree trunk and create a hollow space around it consequently destroying the root system.
You can see it on the the pictures below, which were taken in Puerto Rico the next day after the Hurricane Irene.

The other times it's the branches of the trees that are getting torn by the winds of the hurricane.

Another exotic tropical fruit - Mango!

Mango is one of my favorite tropical fruits.
Mango trees are humongous. Older they get, sweeter their fruits become. The tree produces more  fruits as they age. The root system of this tree is very deep and strong, that's why they can resist high wind of a hurricane. It allows the mango tree to get more mature, unlike other trees because their roots get damaged during hurricanes and they die young.
What I like and dislike at the same time is the flesh of the fruit itself because it has threads that feel almost like floss and sometimes they get stuck in between your teeth. But it worth every bit of it as it tastes so wonderful. I would get all my face dirty with it as I would be eating it. It's amazing  that we are almost meant to eat fruits in a messy way because they also benefit our facial skin a lot.
Mango fruits taste like a mixture of peach and melon. They are very sloppy and not easy to eat. They are juicy and very tasty and their skin is quite thick and feels leathery.