Friday Fabulous Flowers - Tropical Fruit - Jackfruit

Fruit are flowers at the stage of seed dispersal, so FFF is going to get stretched a bit. At no previous time have you had access to more produce more of the time than now. Just a few decades ago many fruits and vegetables were seasonal. Strawberries were available in June. The only lettuce available during the winter was iceberg head lettuce. Now people take year around strawberries for granted, and some of them, improved varieties, actually taste pretty good.
Now even some very exotic tropical fruits are showing up in our markets.  TPP has a long list of exotic fruits he's sampled over the years, but many of those do not travel well and are of dubious quality. Not too long back some lychee showed up that were actually edible; previously they were too old with dried brown skins, and rambutans have made it to markets too.  But what do most people know? 
The smaller yellow papaya that show up in our markets are generally under ripe and terrible; but the larger orange fleshed papayas (below center) are not too bad in some cases and actually taste OK.  Mrs. Phactor likes her passion fruits and mostly they are OK but 10 to 20 times more expensive than in the tropics, or when you have them growing on your back fence. Even when the skins are wrinkly, they may taste just fine.

Pomelos arrived 3-4 years ago. They look exactly like giant grapefruit, and this species, Citrus maxima, is one of the two parents of the hybrid that is grape fruit. The taste is like mild grapefruit, not quite so juicy, but not bitter at all. The fruit wall will peel away with some effort; it's rather thicker than grapefruit. The sections can be separated and peeled relatively easily (a long thin-bladed knife helps), and in SE Asia where it's native the peeled sections are eaten as a refreshing snack. Just last week pomelos were sitting next to grapefruits and had one nice little woman quite confused about which were the "large" grapefruit.
The two latest fruits to show up are pepinos and jack fruit.  Pepinos are a nightshade (Solanum muricatum) looking a little bit like a slightly larger pale, cream-colored plum (but pointy at one end) with purple streaks. The flesh is firm, somewhat melony, but with maybe eggplant highlights. The skin may be a bit bitter.  They have a small seedy core.  They taste OK, but are not one of TPP's favorites. 
The other newbie is Jackfruit (above right). They are a great big old fruit with a green-brown knobby skin, basically a giant tropical mulberry, a close relative of the historically more famous breadfruit (mutiny on the HMS Bounty).  The edible parts are a fleshy layer (aril?) around the rather large seeds, which also are used for some dishes in SE Asia, but TPP has never had the seeds.  No idea how good these jackfruit are having travelled from Central America or Mexico where they are grown now, but at a dollar a pound, it'd cost $20-25 to sample one and what a waste if you don't like them. Again not a TPP favorite, but some have been OK. Apparently they sell 2-3 a week at this market, probably to SE Asians delighted to see something familiar. If every one stops buying them, then they are truly no good, but TPP doesn't know anybody to ask. Any readers care to share their experiences?
Questions about exotic fruits can be sent along to TPP. 

The Great Gelato Challenge - Post game wrap up

TPP is surprised you could stand the suspense, but here it is, with time running out, with the lay-over in Rome coming to an end, so just before we departed Italy, Mrs. Phactor yanked victory from the freezer of defeat!  The little restaurant in one corner of the terminal had, much to Mrs. Phactor's surprise and delight, exactly 1 new flavor of gelato giving her exactly 30 different flavors of gelato in 30 days!  Now some people might want to put an asterisk because technically, based on labels, she had passion fruit gelato twice (and did TPP ever mention his wife's fondness for passion fruit?), but they most assuredly were different flavors, one sort of eh, and the other a brisk, tart-sweet, zing of passion fruit, more or less what we expect!  This unassuming little shop the Cantina del Gelato is about a block along Via dei Bardi from the Ponte Vecchio, but they have the best artisanal gelato. It however lacks the fancy glass display counters and colorful trays, but the aficionados know quality when they find quality. And with gelato, it is all about taste, not appearance.  Also, remember, tastes and licks just don't count, but a small cup with two flavors was allowed. Here's the gelato flavors rundown: coconut, espresso, lemon, mango, vanilla-bourbon, cherries & cream, hazelnut, peach (quite good), mora (blackberry, but sometimes mulberry is also called mora), caramel, pinenut, dark chocolate, passion fruit eh, mojito (lime mostly, hint of mint), mint chocolate chip, pistachio, white chocolate with bits, raisin, peanut butter (a surprise actually), passion fruit zing!, chianti (a real disappointment considering this was in Tuscany), pear & cheese (more like cheesecake with pear bits), mascarpone, tiramisu, strawberry, watermelon, plum, pineapple, chocolate chip, and egg cream (another surprise). You can figure out the problem right away; common and popular flavors are found repeatedly, and toward the end several gelato places failed to produce a new flavor, and the only person this did not disappoint was a nephew who got vanilla at each and every place, a different sort of survey. Mrs. Phactor played it very cagey selecting what she thought was the most unusual flavors first leaving many common flavors until toward the end, e.g., strawberry, which was bloody good strawberry as it turned out. 

Know your tropical fruit

Last night a chance encounter with the Food network program Unwrapped caught my interest because it was featuring passion fruit rose petal ice cream from Out of a Flower in Dallas TX. Anything with passion fruit in it is better than things without, a belief the Phactors came to have while living in the tropics where we rented a passion fruit vine that came with the apartment option. Well, let's just watch this a bit and see the goodness. So the fellow explains, "We start with fresh fruit." And the video shifts to hands peeling, wait for it, mangos. Then they show the mango being pureed and the rest of the whole thing, and not once, not for one second, did they show or work with a passion fruit. Now quite likely the mango rose petal ice cream is great, but passion fruit it ain't unless someone at the food network screwed the pooch and inserted the wrong footage. In a few weeks a trip will take us for far northern Queensland and about 70 km north of Townsville sits the Frosty Mango, the purveyor of some of the world's best tropical fruit ice creams, yes, including passion fruit, although people in the know say the black sapote ice cream is just magic.