Custard Apple

Until I lived in Costa Rica (and had to watch out for falling coconuts on my way to Spanish class!), I never knew how intriguing and bizarre fruits could be.  In the Midwest, we’re fortunate to have a world of berries and apples and pears and cherries at our fingertips — and of course we have tropical staples like avocadoes and bananas in our markets — but when you get closer to rainforests, fruit gets downright odd.  I mean that in a good way.

Take the cherimoya family of fruit.  It includes custard apples (pictured) and soursops, both of which have the texture of custard and a flavor that’s…well,  so fragrantly tropical that you just can’t compare it to anything else.  (Vanilla/pineapple/banana/passionfruit, maybe?)  Soursops are slightly less sweet than custard apples, but both are studded with large, easily-removed seeds nestled into a soft flesh that can be scooped out or cut into quarters and eaten like an apple.  Just don’t try to peel a ripe cherimoya — the thin, green, almost-scaly-looking skin would tear.

When I was in Costa Rica, the soursop ice cream was my favorite, so I was almost giddy with delight when I found custard apples in my local produce market.  Tropical produce seems to be getting more and more common — you might stumble across a cherimoya as well.  If you do, choose one that’s mottled with brown spots and is soft to the touch.  Handle with care, though, because these heavy fruits (each usually weighs a pound or more) are delicate and bruise easily.  If there are only fully-green ones available, bring one home and let it ripen out on the countertop.

You can eat it straight out of the skin, you can drizzle it with a bit of lime juice first, or you can scoop out the flesh, remove the seeds, and then blend the flesh with coconut milk or pineapple juice or anything else tropical that strikes your fancy.  Homemade cherimoya-coconut ice cream would be fabulous!  Or how about a cherimoya daiquiri?

If you can’t use it all at once, cut the cherimoya in half, rub the unused half with lime or lemon juice, wrap it securely in plastic wrap, and refrigerate it overnight.  It’ll be just as fresh and tantalizing the next day.

Enjoy!

Hibiscus Tea

Seems like hibiscus is all the rage: hibiscus tea, hibiscus punch, even sparkling hibiscus beverages in the form of Ooba, the latest smartly-packaged and fizzy “health” drink to hit the shelves.  (It’s a far better option than Coke, true, but I hesitate to call anything that contains mostly sugared water a great beverage choice.)  Seeing all the recent hype prompted me to finally seek out some dried and un-candied hibiscus flowers for myself so that I could come up with my own concoctions.

When you infuse the flowers in water, I found out, you get a lovely deep red hue — it’s like drinking garnets.  (Hibiscus actually stains so well that you can make rinses out of it to give your hair a reddish sheen.  Easter eggs could also be dyed in hibiscus tea.  Just watch out for your countertops!)  The flavor of hibiscus is potent, too, in the sense that it’s very tart and tangy, kind of like cranberries.  I’m a big fan of unsweetened things, but even I had to balance the tea’s acidity with a bit of honey.

Hibiscus is particularly popular in Jamaica.  There, it’s called sorrel and is featured in a number of drink recipes, both rum-based and nonalcoholic.  Typically, it’s mixed with ginger and sugar, and sometimes also with spices like cloves and allspice.  I think it’s also great with lime and/or mixed with other fruit juices.  (The latter is a great way to naturally sweeten the hibiscus without having to resort to sugar.)  The best places to find dried hibiscus flowers are health-food stores, grocery stores that serve Latin or Caribbean populations, or online herb stores like www.mountainroseherbs.com.

Making hibiscus-based drinks is easy — just pour boiling water over a few petals and give it a few minutes to infuse.  The individual petals are large, so ten of them would be more than enough for an entire beer-pitcher-sized pitcher of tea.  You can stir in a bit of honey to taste and drink it hot, or you can put it on ice for iced tea.  You can add lime juice or include a chunk of ginger root in the initial steeping (or cinnamon sticks or any other spice).  Combine with sparkling water to make your own customized fizzy beverage.  Or add fruit juice to your infused hibiscus water and then top off with a bit of rum for the ultimate summer cocktail!

Papaya

The best kind of fruit is the kind that yields all of itself to the cook:  flesh, skin, and seeds.  If it can be used in savory or sweet settings, so much the better!

Enter the papaya, a fruit that can be sliced, sautéed, and served as a vegetable when green.  You can scoop out the flesh and use the sturdy skin as a serving vessel for fruit salads, ice cream, or anything else that can be eaten with a spoon (a fork would rip through the “bowl”).  The sweet, silky-smooth flesh can be included in salsas and salads, puréed into sauces and smoothies, frozen into ice cream, and freeze-dried into chips.  Or you could add an interesting coolness to cocktails by serving them with frozen papaya-chunk “ice cubes.” (Mojito with papaya cubes, anyone?)

The seeds are edible, too, and resemble a cross between a caperberry and a peppercorn — they have the texture of the former and the flavor of the latter.  You can use them as garnish or include them in dishes that call for capers, like baked chicken with a delicate stock-based sauce or poached fish set off with lemon juice and sea salt.  Some cooks in southeastern Asia even dry out the seeds and then grind them the way we would grind peppercorns.

I think the best way to enjoy papayas, though, is straight off the spoon.  Just cut them in half laterally, scoop out the seeds (you might want to leave a few in for contrasting flavor/texture), and then spoon out curls of sweet papaya meat.

Enjoy!