This big, strange-looking fruit was always placed near the similar-sized durians at the market. For this reason, we didn't really think of trying one, I guess guilt by association.
In fact, it is a completely different fruit, and a week before leaving the Philippines, I decided to buy one. They are round or oblong and the skin is made up of half-inch spikes that make it difficult to tell from the outside where the skin ends and the fruit begins. Lena commented that it looked like you're eating a hedgehog. They are very common in Mindanao, but comparitively rare and expensive in Manila. Again needed to look on youtube to figure out what to do. Apparently you just trim open the skin, exposing the fruit inside, which you can then eat with a fork. It's made up of hundreds of grape-sized pods, each with an almond-sized pit inside.
When they sit in your kitchen, the fill the room with a faint burning charcoal smell. It's not bad, but it's unique, and does overpower the other smells in the room. When you open them up, they definitely look other-worldly, and to an American eye, not really appetizing. But we dove in anyway. The first one we tried, we'd let go slightly too long. The fruit tasted like a very, very sweet overripe banana. Not bad, but not something you'd want to charge through - the thing is huge. It would probably take 4-5 people to get through one of these in one sitting, and they're not meant to be stored.
We ate a few of the pods, but didn't get very far. A few days later, Lena's colleagues brought her one back from a trip to Mindanao. It was much fresher, and we got it at the right time. This time, the pods were lighter cream-colored instead of brownish-white, and not as sickly sweet and the flavor much more unique, not as banana-like. It was delicious. Lena described the flavor like the "лох" with which she was familiar growing up. We tried translating this through Wikipedia and got "Russian silverberry", something I'd never heard of or tasted. This time, we ate about half of it.
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