I first tried this fruit in Laos last year, thinking it was a longan, which looks very similar. I thought it tasted different, but thought it might be just a different variety.
In fact, it's a different fruit. Visibly, while the fruits are similar sized, the lanzone has a lighter beige skin, and grows on the branch in clusters, whereas longans seem to grow individually. Both, however, are great fruits.
Here in the Philippines, lanzones are apparently both popular and highly valued. We visited Camiguin island in July, and found out that the island - despite its tourist-brochure beaches and scenery - is most famous in Philippines for its lanzones, and they even have a festival celebrating the abundance of the fruit in October to which many flock. In the Salcedo Saturday Market, about a block from our apartment and where we do most of our fruit shopping, they've been selling lanzones imported from Thailand there since May for a whopping $12/kilo. We passed. Only now, in September, have local lanzones started to appear, and today we bought some for about $4/kilo.
We did, however, eat these on our visit to Singapore in late July, where they were apparently in season and very cheap. We gorged ourselves, along with the mangosteens and rambutans we found at the Chinatown market, all under $3/kilo. Lanzones are a bit challenging to eat - you have to peel off the skin, which can be tedious if you don't get it right on a seam, and it makes your fingers very sticky in a way that scrubbing with soap and water for 5 minutes only barely removes the residue. But it's a small price to pay.
Unlike other fruits here which have very unique taste which are often difficult to describe in words, the lanzone is very easy: it tastes like a light, mild, sweet grapefruit. If you like grapefruit, you'll love lanzones - they're sweeter, have none of the acidic or bitter undertones of grapefruit, and have a soft, mellow texture that's a bit like a grape, but not as firm. The only thing preventing one from eating kilos at a time is the difficulty in opening them.
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