Ugli Fruit

Okay, I’ll admit it — I’ve been shallow.  For years, I’ve avoided the ugli fruit because it was called an ugli fruit.  (And because it didn’t look weird enough.  I get so curious about strange foods I’ve never seen before that I would happily try something called “ugly” as long as it looked weird enough.)

I love citrus, though, and I realized that I’d tried all the other oddball citruses:  pomelos, tangerines, kumquats, yuzus, tangelos, blood oranges, even limequats.  (Yes, they look like kumquats and taste like limes.)  It was just time for things to get ugli.

So they did.  I found out that ugli fruits are oddly baggy — it seems like the skin is a bit too big for the inner sections — and that they taste like a tangy-yet-sweet grapefruit.  The fact that the juicy sections are too small for their britches makes them a bit tricky to squeeze on my citrus juicer but also makes them rather handy to pull out and eat.  All in all, I would say that ugli fruit can be treated like a tart orange or a sweet grapefruit, depending on how you’d like to use it (as drinking juice, tossed with salads, squeezed onto seafood, etc.).  One thing is certain:  ugli fruits sure do taste pretty!