This is another fruit with an acquired taste that I'll miss after leaving. In the Philippines, it's called 'atis', but this is grown throughout the tropics globally and is called 'sugar apple' or 'custard apple' elsewhere. It's a relative of the soursop, on which I posted earlier.
Like many fruits here, these have a very short window of edibility. If you've ever wondered why more exotic fruits don't show up in US supermarkets, the answer become pretty clear when you go shopping here. We typically go to the market on Saturday and with wide eyes, fill up several shopping bags with fruit. By Tuesday or Wednesday, anything we haven't eaten is bound to have spoiled. It's frustrating to have to throw away a third or more of what you've bought by midway through the week.
The atis fits squarely within that category. I think the first time we tried these when they first came into season in June, we waited a day too long. We opened them up and inside, it was dry a browning. But we gave them another try later - and now there's piles of them at the market - and while it's been hard to convince Lena to give it a second chance, I am now downing a couple of these a day easy.
It's a strange looking fruit - with green, tiled-roof-like scales. It's not immediately obvious how you eat one of these things. When you buy them, they're firm, so are you supposed to cut them open, peel off the skin, bite right in? Turns out, when they ripen and become ready to eat, they soften enough that if you squeeze a little, you can just break it in half with your hand. Inside, there's a sticky white flesh, speckled by many, many hard black seeds slightly bigger and shinier than watermelon seeds. It's not pretty like some fruits here - honestly, it looks kind of like in a sci-fi movie, when they open up an alen for surgery.
So, the atis is not super easy to eat. The only way I've figured out - and this is after some searching online to verify - is to take a teaspoon, and one scoop at a time, lift out the flesh. It doesn't taste like a fruit. It tastes more like a dessert - like a grittier version of a panna cotta, or a rice pudding. There's a distinct, but very mild licorice flavor that gives character to the sweetness, and it has a tinge of that floral, tropical flavor - like lemon or pineapple - that many fruits have here to one degree or another. There's also the seeds. You're basically sucking the flesh off of the seeds with each spoonfull, and you have to eat this with some sort of receptacle nearby in order to spit out the many, many seeds. Makes you feel kind of like you're chewing tobacco.
But I've really grown to like this fruit, and now buy it every time I go shopping. I've learned not to buy that many, because you're lucky if you get one or two days of ripeness out of these before they degenerate into a black, smelly mass.
Comments