Snake Fruit
Tapas, flamenco, red wine, olive oil, ham, Manchego cheese…and snake fruit. Those are my overriding impressions from a recent trip to Spain. I hadn’t expected to find rambutans and snake fruit in the mercado central, but I was overjoyed when I spotted the bins of frutas exóticas — ever since I’d gotten my first glimpse of snake fruit (also called salak) in a fruit encyclopedia, I’d been wanting to get my hands on one to see how it would taste and feel.
This scaly, teardrop-shaped fruit is native to Indonesia, where several different cultivars of salak are commercially grown. Sometimes they’re incorporated into fruit salads or paired with ice cream for a dessert, but they’re often also consumed simply as they are. That’s how I prefer them — they have such a delicate and haunting flavor that I can’t imagine overshadowing them with anything else. It’s hard to pin down how a salak tastes, though, because it’s such a distinct and aromatic fruit. The best comparison I can make is to a passionfruit. A passionfruit that has somehow managed to blend itself with a pineapple and a kiwi, that is. Quite a refreshing 3-in-1.
If you do have the fortune to stumble upon a snake fruit, choose one that’s fairly firm but that still gives a bit to the touch. (If it doesn’t flex at all, it’s probably old and dried out.) Just cut off the pointed end, place the tip of the knife under the skin, and peel back a section of skin. The rest will come off easily enough. All of the interior white flesh is edible, although each one hides a large and inedible pit. Just pull it out or nibble around it…and see if you can come up with a word to describe its flavor. I’m sticking with a simple one: “delicious.”
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Tags: exotic fruit, indonesia, salak, snake fruit
