Fruity Fridays - Red Dragon Fruit

This week's fruit: Red Dragon Fruit

Also known as: Pitaya, Pitahaya

Vietnamese name: Thanh Long

Cost in the market outside my house: 40,000 dong ($2)/kilo (I think the white ones are cheaper, as they're more common)

Season in Northern Vietnam: They seem to be around a bit now, July-August, but they certainly aren't as common as the white variety. I don't eat this stuff much so I don't really know. I think they might be brought up from the South.

Interesting facts: This is actually the fruit of a climbing cactus, and grows at the end of a long leaf, as you can see here. The Vietnamese name literally translates to "Green Dragon" and is meant to reflect the way the cactus looks like a dragon as it climbs up the tree. The fruit is high in vitamin C, antioxidants and fibre and thus exceptionally good for you. High consumption of this fruit will turn your urine and feces slightly red. And finally, legend has it that a tribe in Southern Arizona treasured this fruit so much that after eating it, they would dry their poo, separate the seeds, grind them into flour, and eat them again, thus having a 'second harvest' of Dragon Fruit.*

 This is one of the funkiest-looking fruits out there, so I had to share it with you. If you don't know what it is, you'll think its bright pink skin and spiky green leaves are just about the strangest thing you've ever seen! They come in two varieties here, the quite common white-fleshed version and the much more rare red-fleshed version. They look identical on the outside, so the only way to know what you're buying is to ask the seller and trust that they're telling you the truth. (they are; why wouldn't they?)

It's pretty amazing to slice it open and see this beautiful red flesh inside, dotted with tiny edible black seeds.

To eat it, just wait until it gives just a little bit when squeezed (not too hard!), slice it down the middle, and scoop it out with a spoon. People say it's better chilled, but I don't think it really matters. I think just scooping it with a spoon is the way most people eat it, aside from maybe in the occasional shake or smoothie.

I scooped it out, then cut it into cube-ish shapes and put it back in the skin to serve. This would be extra pretty with the white one against the pink skin!

I've never been a fan of Dragon Fruit. It's not bad, there's nothing wrong with it, but I've always just found it kind of bland and boring. But then, until now I've only ever had the white-fleshed one. I'd been told the red one is better, and it's true! It has a slightly soft texture and is sweeter and a bit more flavourful than the white one. Most people compare it to a kiwi, which I think is a pretty fair comparison, both in texture and taste.

I haven't eaten this any other way besides in fruit salad or with my muesli and yogurt in the morning, and I can't imagine you'd want to cook it, but I've seen recipes for dragon fruit salsa to go with fish or seafood, which sounds pretty good. Also, this website has a couple of recipes I'd be pretty tempted to try!

Have you ever tried dragon fruit? Have you eaten it any way besides just straight out of the skin? Let me know!

*All information from wikipedia and this website.

Fruity Fridays - Mulberry Madness!

This week's fruit: Mulberry

Vietnamese name: Quả dâu tằm

Cost from a lady on the street near work: 50,000 dong (roughly $2.50) per kilo

Season in Northern Vietnam: April, give or take a week or two

Interesting facts: - Some parts of the mulberry tree have a white sap that can be toxic and/or mildly hallucinogenic.
- Some cities have banned mulberry trees because the amount of pollen they produce can pose a health hazard for those with allergies.
- Mulberry leaves are the only food of the silkworm, and thus areas where mulberry trees are plentiful often also produce a lot of silk.
- The Roman myth of Pyramus and Thisbe provides a story of the mulberry fruit's color. According to the tale, after the two lovers die tragically, the gods listen to Thisbe's lament and forever change the color of the mulberry fruits into their red stained color to honor the forbidden love.
(All info from Wikipedia.org)

As I think I've mentioned before, Hanoi has a severe lack of berries. We get somewhat flavourless strawberries for a while in the winter, and that's about it! I miss the lovely berry season at home.

However, one thing that Vietnam does have plenty of is silk, and that means every spring we get mulberry season! Until I came here, I'd never actually seen a mulberry, but I remember mulberry bushes featuring in nursery rhymes when I was a kid. I had also, on various parts of my travels, seen silkworms muching on the leaves and eaten the silkworm larvae.

One day in the first spring I was here I was walking down a street in the old quarter and saw one of those women in a conical hat carrying two baskets hanging from a bar over their shoulders, and what she had in her baskets looked very purple and berry-like. Curious, I bought half a kilo and took them home. After a little bit of googling, I concluded that they were mulberries, and should have been incredibly delicious. The only problem was that I didn't find them to be very tasty. They're a bit on the sour side, with not too much flavour.

So what do you do with sour, tasteless berries? You stew them up with some sugar and a bit of water, until they're cooked down into a lovely sauce that goes wonderfully on pancakes!

I didn't see anyone selling the berries again that year, not for lack of looking! I found myself wishing I'd bought more than half a kilo, so the next year when I found a woman selling them near work, I bought a full kilo and, inspired by my grandma's apple-blackberry pie, I made a delicious apple-mulberry pie to take to a barbecue.

That pie was a big hit amongst my friends, but aside from making more sauce for my pancakes and ice cream, I didn't use the mulberries for anything, and just put some in my freezer. My friend Will, however, put some in alcohol and made a beautifully smooth liqueur.

A couple of words of caution about mulberries: First, I've been told they have some kind of tiny worms inside that can make you sick. For this reason I pretty much always cook them with sugar before I use them. With my somewhat flavourless berries, stewing them this way makes the flavour come out so I would probably do it anyway! Second, mulberries will stain anything they touch purple, so if you're using them, wear old clothes!

This year, as soon as I saw the mulberries for sale I was all over them. I started with mulberry ice cream, based on this recipe from Carol Anne's Kitchen. Of course I used my stewed berries, and adjusted the sugar accordingly. It really ended up more like a frozen mousse with chewy clumps of mulberry than a proper ice cream, but was fantastic just the same!

After the ice cream I was inspired by the mousse idea, and my friend Tu was having a housewarming party, so I offered to contribute dessert. I took a mulberry mousse cake, which was nothing short of amazing!

I started with a chocolate crumb base made from crushed up Oreos (I spent a while separating and scraping the icing off) butter, and a bit of sugar. Then, because I wanted a bit more of a fudgy, gooey cake, I made a simple ganache with some semi-sweet chocolate chips and heavy cream, and put that on top of the crust.

I then used roughly the same recipe as the girls and I used for our mango mousse cake on our Staff Class cooking day last year. As with that one, I left a little bit of the mousse without whipped cream, and made a dark layer on the top. Just before serving I garnished it with white chocolate shavings and a sprig of mint, and despite being a bit rough around the edges (I probably should've greased the pan a bit) it looked really good!

 

  

It also tasted absolutely delicious, with the sweetness of my layer of ganache achieving the exact fudginess that I had wanted and contrasting wonderfully with the slightly tart berry mousse layer. My only complaint might have been that the crust was a little hard at times, but really, that was a pretty minor issue. It was so good that my friend Ian had two servings, and I've only ever seen him do that with gin!

The last thing I made with my mulberries was popsicles. I simply pureed some of my stewed berries, added a bit more sugar, and poured them in the popsicle molds. The first one I ate was very dense, so I melted down the last three, added a bit more water, and poured it back into all four molds. If I was doing it again, I'd maybe leave out most of the solids and just use the juice, as I like quite an icy fruit-flavoured popsicle. One thing to note is that when I eat one of these, my lips and the entire inside of my mouth turn purple.

 

There are lots of other things you could do with mulberries. Thousands of recipes for mulberry jam can be found on the internet, but as I don't eat very much jam and I still have most of the Roselle jam that I made, I decided that might not be the best course of action for me. 

 Mulberries, or at least the juice or syrup, could also be used in savoury dishes too. This website gives a TON of recipes for everything from Mulberry Meringue Pie to Chipotle Mulberry sauce (I might have to try this one!) What's your favourite mulberry recipe? Please share!

 

Fruit mousse:

2 packets unflavoured gelatin

about 3 cups of fruit

Juice of ½ a lime

¼ tsp vanilla (optional)

1.5 cups whipping cream

3-4 tablespoons sugar (to taste)

Puree the fruit in a blender with a bit of water. Add lime juice and vanilla. Reserve 3/4 cup of this for the cake topping, if desired.

Sprinkle the gelatin into ½ cup water in a heatproof cup, place in a pot of hot water that comes halfway up the side of the cup. Stir until gelatin is all dissolved. Add this to the fruit mixture.

Whip the cream in a separate bowl, adding 3-4 tablespoons of sugar to taste (depending on how sweet the fruit is) until soft peaks form. Fold 1/3 of this into the main fruit mixture, then fold in the rest.

Pour into bowls or on top of cake base of your choice. Chill in the fridge for 4-5 hours to set.



  

Fruity Fridays - Milk fruit

This week's fruit: milk fruit

Also known as: star apple, cainito, abiaba, estrella, aguay

Vietnamese name: vú sữa (literally translates to "breast milk")

Cost in the market outside my house: 40,000 dong (roughly $2) per kilo

Season in Northern Vietnam: I think they're generally all imported from the South!

Interesting facts: In Jamaica, the flesh is often eaten with sour orange juice, a combination called "matrimony". Maybe this is related to the idea that it's the "breast milk fruit". Before you eat it, you're supposed to "massage" it or squeeze it gently to release the juice. You can then cut a hole in the top and suck out the sweet milk!

I first learned about this fruit on a market tour with Hanoi Cooking Centre. We got to try it, and it was ok but nothing special, but I decided it was time to give it another go. (Remember what happened with custard apples? I didn't like it much the first time, tried it again 2 years later and now they're one of my favourite fruits!)

In Vietnam, these are usually greenish, sometimes with a purple tinge, but are white on the inside. In other places, they also come in dark purple (with purplish flesh) and yellow, but apparently the yellow ones are rare.

I bought these two milk fruits in the market and honestly they sat in my apartment for a week or so before I was really inspired to eat them, so by that time they were getting quite soft!

One was softer than the other, so I decided to try squeezing that one, and the top just split right open. However, you can see the milk oozing out of it between my fingers!

Sucking the milk out wasn't much of an option because it had all gotten rather messy, but I sort of tipped it and drank what I could, then scooped the flesh out with a spoon.

The milk and the flesh both have a taste that I can only describe as sweet and milky, but I'm not a big fan of the texture of the flesh. It's a bit grainy, much like the sapodilla (actually I read that they are a member of the same family). People say the milk not only looks like breast milk, but it tastes like it too! I couldn't say as the last time I drank breast milk was, well, let's just say it was so long ago I can't remember!

I decided to eat the second one a different way, to show you the pretty star pattern inside.

I then ate this with a spoon as well. You can't eat the rind of this fruit at all, and you wouldn't want to as it's quite waxy on the outside.

I haven't cooked anything with this, and honestly I probably won't. These people in Northeastern Australia said that in September-October they have far more of these than they know what to do with, and they can't sell them because everyone has them, and they tried drying them and making jam and none of it worked. The only recipe they had (and that I've seen) was their recipe for Star Apple whip. I guess you'll just have to enjoy your "breast milk fruit" as is!

Fruity Fridays - Roselle

This week's fruit: Roselle, a member of the hibiscus family

Also known as: rosella, Jamaica flower, and a hundred other names in various parts of the world

Vietnamese name: Bụp giấm


Cost in the market outside my house: 20,000 dong (roughly $1) per kilo

Season in Northern Vietnam: I bought these around the end of October, so maybe October - November

Interesting facts: This plant seems to be used for everything. It's often used to treat cough, urinary tract infections, cardiac and nerve diseases, cancer, and several other things I've never heard of. It's used as a laxative and a mild diuretic. It's a food colouring, and the fibres from the stalks can be used as a substitute for jute. The leaves are used in cooking and to make lotion to heal wounds. The seed oil is used to treat sores on camels. It's used to make juice and tea that is high in Vitamin C and is believed to reduce cholesterol, and is also occasionally made into wine. I'm reasonably certain that when I drank "hibiscus tea" in the Middle East, it was probably made from Roselle.

 These weird shaped fruits look like soft little flowers, but those "petals" are actually called calyces and are hard and crunchy, and taste quite sour! I tried one but it turned out that I wasn't interested in eating it raw and by itself!

When you break the calyces off, you find this seed pod inside.

The first and easiest thing I made with this was iced roselle tea (or juice!). I found this website that has a few recipes for roselle and just followed the instructions on it. All it involved was separating the calyces from the seed pods....

...boiling them down with some water...

....then straining out the syrup, adding sugar and stirring until it's dissolved, and then topping it up with ice.

It was tasty, but not something I'd want all the time.

Next, I made jam using a recipe on the same website. Normally for jam you need pectin, but the seed pods of the roselle have a lot of pectin in them already, so it was a simple matter of extracting it without getting all the seeds in the jam!

To do that, I separated the seed pods from the calyces, put the pods in a pot with some water and boiled them for about 15 minutes. The recipe said that after 10 minutes they should be soft and translucent, but mine never got very soft! They were just a bit slimy on the outside.

Then I strained the seed pods out and threw them away. I put the liquid (now full of pectin) back into the pot and added the calyces, including the leftover already-boiled ones from my juice.

I then boiled this all down for half an hour or so until it was all very soft, then measured it carefully to find that I had about 2 cups. The recipe said to add the same amount of sugar, but that seemed like a lot, (Yeah, I know, jam has a lot of sugar in it) so I added about a cup and a half and then tasted it. It seemed alright, but then as I cooked it more and tasted it more I ended up adding that extra half cup anyway!

The recipe said the jam would froth right up but mine never did. It only got this bit of foam on the top which I carefully scraped off.

I ended up with this lovely dark red jam. Apparently one way to know it's reached its setting point is to watch for it to stop frothing, but since mine never frothed, I had to use a different way. The recipe also suggested putting a saucer in the freezer, then testing a teaspoon of jam on it to see if it sets. I did this and I still wasn't entirely sure if it was at setting point, but it seemed ok!

Then it was time to put it in jars. I have a few that I brought from home with proper canning lids, and the amount of jam I had filled two of them perfectly! As you may remember from when I made Grandma's Dill Pickles, I have some difficulty with the actual jar processing part because I really don't have proper canning equipment. To have my jars of jam standing up in the pot with water covering the tops, I had to have water RIGHT up to the brim of my biggest pot.

But it worked! Both of these jars sealed, and I had a tiny bit of jam left over to eat with some fresh bread I bought the next day. It's a bit like a berry jam, with the deep red colour but despite all the sugar, it has a bit of a tartness to it. It's pretty yummy!

This was my first-ever jam-making attempt, aside from when I was a kid and we had a family strawberry jam-making day every year, which I really don't remember enough of for it to have had any effect. I'm pretty proud that my first time turned out so well! The only problem is that I don't eat very much jam. My "toaster oven" is really more oven than toaster, so it really just kind of bakes any slice of bread that I'm trying to toast. Thus, I rarely eat toast. However, my friend Jacqui from Fashion & Pho mentioned today that she's looking forward to eating crumpets when she goes home for Christmas, which reminded me that I have a recipe for crumpets that I've been meaning to try, so maybe soon I'll have fresh crumpets with roselle jam! Yum!

Fruity Fridays - Custard Apple

This Friday's Fruit: Custard Apple

Also known as: Sugar-apple, Sweetsop, Custard-pineapple

Vietnamese name: mãng cầu

Cost in the market outside my house: 30-40,000 VND/kilogram

Season in Northern Vietnam: August - September

Interesting facts: A company in the Philippines produces Sugar-apple wine! In India, they grind the seeds and put them on their hair to get rid of lice, but have to be careful to keep it out of their eyes because the substance can cause blindness. (Wikipedia, 2012)

When you cut open a custard apple, it looks like this inside.

However, if it's soft enough you can just peel the sections of peel off the outside very easily...


...and then pull it apart into sections.

Each small section has a black seed inside of it, which you can squeeze out one by one. I found the easiest way was to squish it all through my hands so that the seeds come out of the flesh themselves, and then it was easy to just pick them out of the bowl.

Custard apple has a sweet, slippery, custardy taste that I find absolutely delicious. When I first got here I had one and I wasn't terribly impressed, but maybe it wasn't a good one because two years later when I tried one again, I absolutely loved it! The weird thing is that while I don't usually like cold fruit, I love these when they're a little bit chilled.

These don't need to be made into anything. I love them just plain, as they are. They also went very nicely with my morning muesli and yogurt!

I did make a custard apple and passion fruit cheesecake, using this recipe, which comes complete with tips for using custard apples in cooking! I modified it a bit because I didn't have gingernut biscuits or macadamia nuts (I used digestive biscuits and almonds) and I didn't have ricotta cheese (I used Laughing Cow - not my first choice but it was what was available, and tasted ok!) but it was still pretty tasty!

So, if you ever get a chance to try one of these funny looking fruits, DO IT! They might look weird, but I was very sad when the season was over because they are DELICIOUS!

Fruity Fridays - Sri Lankan mystery fruit number two!

I mentioned last week that I went to Sri Lanka for two weeks. And that there was lots of fruit. One day at breakfast I had a choice between a glass of fresh fruit juice or a fruit plate. I asked for the fruit plate, and this is what I got:

That's FAR more fruit than I could ever eat in one sitting, but I gave it a pretty good try!

Anyway, last week I told you all about the fruit stand I stumbled upon that had all sorts of strange fruits. One of them was this:

The guy called it an Australian Ice Cone, but after a lot of searching for various versions of this name, all I've come up with is snow cones in Australia, which are a very different thing! I have absolutely no idea what this fruit actually is.

On the outside it's a bit fuzzy, like a peach, and quite firm. When you cut it open, you see sections of fuzzy white fruit, each with a stone inside. I suspect the fuzziness is where the "ice" name came from.

The taste was a bit like a lychee I guess, but that fuzziness is a somewhat strange texture to have on a fruit! I didn't mind this one, but certainly didn't love it.



So, readers, does anyone have any idea what this might be? Have you seen it or tried it before? Where? What's it really called? I'm very curious!