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I live in Cambodia where all of these fruits are available, and more. I like every fruit mentioned, except salak, and eat many of them every day.
This author comes off as a deeply uncultured American giving a generic impression of a drunken 3-5 day visit to SEA. There are so many errors in this article it's unreal.
Jackfruit does not have a "jagged sheath" (that's durian).
Dragon fruit is only mushy when it's badly bruised or overripe, and there are other varieties that are sweeter and richer than the white variety.
Durian does not "stink of death".
Salak are normally imported from Indonesia, as far as I know. Maybe the author is thinking of salacca wallichiana, which is related but tastes very different?
Describing a langsat as a "demure cousin" of the lychee is a totally meaningless way of saying that they belong to the same order of plants.
Author is probably being unnecessarily hyperbolic in order to make the piece interesting.
To me, dragon fruit flesh is similar to that of Asian pears, firm, crisp, sweet and refreshing. The tiny black seeds are akin to strawberry seeds in that they add to the texture but are otherwise unnoticeable.
I had my first taste of a dragon fruit a couple of years ago on a Cathay Pacific flight (amazing inflight meals btw) and was like where have you been my whole life. I knew I had to get some when I returned to the US. I quickly learned that most grocery stores in US do carry them... for about $6 per lb. They’re not cheap treats.
> Durian does not "stink of death".
It does stink to some (many?) people, much the same way some people think that cilantro tastes like soap. Which is why you see "no durian" stickers in public places throughout Asia.
> Jackfruit does not have a "jagged sheath" (that's durian).
Durian's spikes are pointier, but you can call both of them jagged.
Hannah Beech has been an SEA bureau chief at the NYT and, before that, Time Magazine for something like a decade, and wrote for Time Asia for years prior to that. I don't think "deeply uncultured American" helped your argument, and note that most of the fruit-related points you made here were challenged downthread.
"Durian does not stink of death"
Sounds like you're the one spreading lies. Durian is without a doubt, the smelliest, nastiest fruit I have ever had the displeasure of ever smelling or eating in my life. My wife is from SEA and literally laughed out loud when I showed her your post. Check yourself before you try to check others.
> Durian does not "stink of death".
I once went to a durian place in Malaysia. As we approached (they hadn't told me where we were going, it was a surprise), my first thought from the smell was that perhaps there was an animal dead off the side of the road.
Tasty though.
YMMV, but I find that the taste of salak varies wildly. Sometimes they're mealy, dry, astringent and generally unpleasant. Sometimes they're crisp and tart like a tropical apple, and thoroughly delicious.
Dragon fruit is pitaya, native to Mexico and central America https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitaya
I don't know when the branding changed but I'm willing to bet some form of biopiracy was involved in the trade.
It puzzles me how the smell of durian, which I find very aromatic, can be disgusting to some people.
Also dragon fruit is a 'bland mush'? I've must have been eating the wrong fruit. There's also a red dragon fruit which is a little tastier.
never in my life i had mushy dragon fruit and ate it multiple times a week when lived in Asia for years, i like it cooled from fridge
I've never understood what's even stinky about durian, it just has its own odor like any other fruit, nothing deserving special treatment media give it, must be some durian wholesalers conspiracy trying to make it more interesting than it actually is
Dragon fruit can be grown in California, Florida, and Hawaii and is not "bland mush with tiny seeds that can require floss to dislodge". The author must have had a bad one. They can be extremely sweet. The seeds are so small that they go down without noticing and I've never had to use floss. My favorite is a variety with deep red flesh.
Mangosteen is so far from its depiction---"to eat a pile of mangosteens is an exercise in disappointment"---that I wonder what kind of pile the author ate. In the US, imported mangosteens can run $20 a pound, so getting a few bad ones would be a disappointment. I suppose many vendors would issue a refund for the bad ones. But in Thailand a pile of mangosteens is so cheap that you wouldn't bother. They are exquisite, almost the fruit equivalent of ice cream (they taste better chilled). It's no wonder they call it the queen of fruits.
Durian likewise deserves its designation as king of fruits. Most people, myself included, are repulsed on the first encounter. But if you can get over the initial shock, you will enjoy the most flavorful fruit with custard-like texture. Its flavor can be described as a combination of many other fruit flavors with a complexity only matched by good coffee and dark chocolate.
Jackfruit is cheap and abundant in Mexican and Asian supermarkets in the US. The trouble is peeling and finishing a whole one. Some stores may sell wrapped pieces if you just want a taste. But if you have some guests and time to work with gloves and a knife, eating a whole jackfruit is a memorable experience.
I don't dislike Dragon Fruit but having had 30 or so of them in SE Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan) I've never had one that was "extremely sweet". All of them were relatively on the bland every place I had one. It's good to know they can be sweet but I'm curious why finding a sweet one is so rare.
As for the seeds I agree. It's like eating kiwi seeds.
Mangosteen is great! No idea why the author had so much hate.
Durian though ... well I've tried it about 7-8 times and I get that it "tastes" good but I still don't get it. For example in Singapore there is a chain of cream puff stores that carry durian and vanilla cream puffs. To my "unrefined" palette they taste 95% the same but one stinks so if I was to go again I'd choose the vanilla that doesn't stink vs the durian that does. I'm sure I'll try them again but I suspect my reaction will be the same. Tastes fine (like vanilla custard) but why put up with the stink when I can just have vanilla custard.
That said, last summer when I was in Malaysia was the first time the smell started not being so repelling so (a) I'm getting used to it (b) they were in season (c) like the cat virus they've reprogramed my brain :P
The other problem is lack of variety due to transportation problems. You're limited by what travels well, and when it's hard enough to get one type overseas without problems, you probably aren't sending multiple varieties.
A lot of people have heard by now that there are many interesting types of bananas overseas, but they don't travel well enough to reach other countries. The same goes for other fruits. I remember once reading about a durian that has nearly none of the repulsive flavours, but they just aren't common enough to send away from local markets (I think it was in Malaysia).
On the other hand though some fruits freeze decently well, durian is one of those. Especially if you're cooking with it the peeled pieces are great.
Re: mangosteens, the author isn't saying mangosteens taste disappointing, they're saying that finding lots with the 'mustard blight' is disappointing.
If you can pick your own, though, they're in my experience pretty avoidable: go for ones that are purple, not black, and avoid any that have traces of yellow leaking from the top.
I've heard a lot about dragon fruit over the years and seen plenty of hype about it. I've been on what feels like a lifelong quest to find good dragon fruit, spread over many years and many countries, including throughout SE Asia. Somehow, it's all been just watery in flavor with the texture of soft watermelon.
>Dragon fruit can be grown in California, Florida, and Hawaii and is not "bland mush with tiny seeds that can require floss to dislodge". The author must have had a bad one. They can be extremely sweet. The seeds are so small that they go down without noticing and I've never had to use floss. My favorite is a variety with deep red flesh.
I've been trying to find a good one in the states, so far no luck. I've only tried ones with the red flesh. The ones I had weren't bad, they were just flavorless. Not sweet at all. Kind of refreshing, but nothing special.
Longtime New York Times international correspondent R.W. Apple, a great epicure, called mangosteen the finest fruit in the world.
I believe you can find canned jackfruit flesh. It tastes very different from fresh ones unfortunately.
The primary limiting factor in distributing these is not that they're hard to eat: pineapples are a pain too, but they're available everywhere, while many of the fruit listed (eg. rambutan, salak/snakefruit, langsat/duku) are trivial to peel.
Instead, it's simply that they don't transport well. Most tropical fruit available in the West are picked raw, kept refrigerated and chemically ripened on arrival, but this isn't possible for most of the fruit listed, certainly not mangosteens or langsat/duku.
This isn't exclusive to exotic fruit either.
In a trip to central Washington, I bought a flat of Pluots (plum/apricot hybrids), and they were one of the most profound things I have ever eaten. So sweet and juicy, they almost burst like water balloons when you took a bite.
Less than four hours away from where they are grown, I have yet to find any varieties with the same magic available in grocery stores. They good ones are simply too delicate and too short lived.
It ends up being worth the trip every year to go when they are in season.
Exotic fruits have been interesting to me in a while, and I hope to get my hands on some in my own country. For others interested, there's a channel which is all about exotic fruits and foods in general (including Thai ones), and his videos are always extremely informative and conscious[0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChsbD6Clp-ZPqKwXJR3V7DQ
Longan and papaya are pretty easy to find in New Orleans if you know where to look.
In the Indian subcontinent a common phrase is "the jackfruit is still on the tree and you've already put oil on your lips/mustache" meaning don't count your chickens before the eggs have hatched.
I'm a homebody but great fruit I will travel for. The absolute best fruit is ripened on the plant to the point of being so soft that it would be destroyed if handled. I drive hours to various wild blackberry bushes around Northern California and eat them right off the bush -- just the act of separating them from the bush basically splits them in half so they could never be sold commercially.
These are all pretty easy to find in Los Angeles, New York, and the Bay. How many other things do you see if you actually venture to SE Asia?
Central America has all kinds of things that I never see here, eg. canistel or black sapote, as well as variants of mango, corn, and banana that don't sell in the US.
Here in Australia, you can actually get fresh durians!
There are only 50 odd trees in the country, near Darwin, so the fruit cost a mint by the time they are flow to Melbourne and Sydney. They're good. The consensus is better than the Thai ones, but I hang around Malaysians, who have a low opinion of Thai durians.
Around 1980, there was talk of growing tropical fruit in Northern Australia. Our seasons are out of phase with Asia's, so that would have made a lot of sense. I don't know why it didn't happen.
There is one problem that the article doesn't mention: people who haven't been to Southeast Asia tend to mistake the durian smell for a gas leak, and call the fire brigade. You have to be careful where you take them in the west.
My wife's family is from SE Asia and I always eat way more fruit than normal when visiting. It's always cheap, plentiful and high quality.
Star fruit are one of my favorites. Kind of a crunchy, tart apple flavor.
Thai durian is nothing when compared to the smell and taste of Malaysian durian.
I love durian but the smell can be overpowering. I left a few in my car for an afternoon, parked in an underground garage, to bring to my family after work. I had to drive with the windows down for 2 weeks.
On a recent trip to Bangkok it was often hard to tell whether one was approaching an actual open sewer or just a durian stall.
Sad I missed the fruit market though, I bet they have a massive variety of banana cultivars. I tried a couple I'd never had before when over there.
Jackfruit is one of the most nutritious and colon healthy vegetable on the planet. It is full of healthy fiber and keeps you feeling full long after unlike other vegetables. Many families in South india cosume lot of jackfruit in the season. https://thejackfruitcompany.com/jackfruit-101/
Another fun Thai fruit: ตะขบ (`da kop`), which are these tiny custard-like berries that literally spoil within hours after picking them. They make great shade trees, so you can often find them growing over a road in residential areas, and just pick a couple to eat on the spot. You'll never find them in a store, but they're a quintessential part of childhood here.
> the durian would still probably have the highest grapple factor among Southeast Asia’s endemic fruits. Thai exports of the fruit are mostly destined for China, where consumers tend to be more willing to work for their meals.
Actually, Durain is not that hard to process, a chopstick or a screwdriver can do the job easily, can't be harder than opening a whole Jamón.
And in other news, durian causes an evacuation in Germany and sends people to a hospital... but I love durian!
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/europe/durian-germany-evacuat...
Is work being done to develop easy to peel, low seed count cultivars of various exotic fruits like these? I can only imagine that their consumptive experience is similar to what Native Americans dealt with when they first encountered bananas tens of thousands of years ago.
These fruit are hardly unique to Thailand and I ate them all as a kid in Malaysia (which of course abuts Thailand) and Singapore. I believe they are all available in other nearby countries as well. National borders are pretty arbitrary.
My wife loves fruit and she's willing to put in the effort to eat fruit (peel, dig, carve, etc. etc.)
As for me, while there's certain fruit I do like a lot, I'm far less willing to put in the effort and often I just don't bother.
Dragon fruit is actually native to Central America, not SE Asia. It's the fruit of a cactus. [1]
Easy Mode Durian: frozen durian has most of the taste and little of the smell.
What's going on with the nyt? This is incredibly bad quality writing.
I'm always amazed at the various types of delicious fruit nature produces. Walking over a foreign market is like fruit fantasy land for me.
The author must have had an overripe dragonfruit - their flavor is subtle but quite lovely. not tasteless or mushy in the slightest
unpopular opinion - durian is overrated, I don't get what's so special about it, even the smell is not really that big, people must have fancy noses if they think it's particularly smelly, some European cheeses are way more (unpleasantly) smellier
my favorite of exotic fruit is dragon fruit - looks nice, easy to consume with spoon, good flavor
All of these fruits are popular all over Southeast Asia and India.
As someone who grew up in southern India in a house literally surrounded by at least few dozens of these trees[1], most of them also hosting black pepper creepers, I wonder how this became Thai Fruit? Come on, we even have a western name!
Hilariously, in Singapore jackfruit is banned on public transport because it smells so awful. I tried some of this though and it it's not a flavor that I had tasted before. Hard to describe but really good if you could hold your nose for the smell.
"when the rising mercury concentrates sugars"
Mercury is not capitalized here, which makes a huge difference. In assuming astrological Mercury, not somehow the element?