With many tropical fruits we've tried, you kind of have to let yourself acquire the taste. At first, they're kind of strange and unfamiliar. You might not try it again for a while. Then you see a huge pile at a roadside stand selling cheap, and you think, 'yeah, those were ok, let's buy some'. Then you get to a point where you consume all those you just bought in one sitting, and find yourself plotting where to find more so late at night.
This is one of those fruits. Consuming it, the santol is less of an 'eating fruit' experience and more like a 'binge on candy' experience. You cut in half these yellow-orange, tennis-ball sized fruits, and find these transluscent, juicy white flesh-covered seeds in the middle, surrounded by a thick rubbery skin. You clamp out the seeds with your teeth, and then slosh it around in your mouth for a few minutes, sucking off the fibrous flesh. So you're not really actually eating very much, and a kilo of santols might net you a few hundred grams of fruit.
But the flesh itself is so delicious and unique, it's worth the effort. A good santol has an intensely sweet-sour flavor, the acid so pervasive it almost makes you cringe like when you taste a lemon. But at the same time, it's so sweet and fruity, you plow right through the acid - much like eating a handfull of sweettarts. It's hard to compare the actual fruit flavor to something familiar - it's slightly lemon like, slightly grapefruit, but at the same time much more floral and complex.
There's also an element of danger involved. The seeds themselves are hard with sharp edges. Whie big, they are indigestible. Apparently if you do swallow them - not something that would be easy to do accidentally, to be sure - you will need emergency surgery to remove them to prevent them from ripping up your intestines. So in addition to the flavor, there's that adventurous blowfish angle as well.
We tried a few of these when we first arrived in Manila, and then kind of ignored them until a couple months later when I guess they really came into season. Seeing so many at the market, we bought a bunch. And while the fruits themselves are tennis- or even softball-sized, the edible portion is so small that you don't even notice going through a few kilos at a time, which is really easy to do, since the taste is so insanely addictive. Once you start with these, it's hard to stop.
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