What's My Fruit? - Episode 3
While we were at the Ford dealership we went to the market full of weird and wonderful things across the road again. At this time of the year, there are rather fewer of the more demented fruits that are within the range that I would consider trying - the rambutan and dosakai were absent this time - but I did find something that looked subtly geometric with apparent rivets.
Whitney has told me that these aren't actually all that rare where she comes from, but I had never seen one before - this was labelled "cactus-pear", and is a relative of the dragonfruit.
The first thing to know about this fruit is that it's more quietly dangerous than the others, hence the glove in the photograph. It looks and feels innocent enough with the outer cactus-like parts removed, and you won't feel anything at first, but a while after picking it up, you'll suddenly get pains in your palms and notice that your hands are covered in tiny spines that it's painlessly shoved into your skin while you weren't looking. So if you haven't handled it with respect, you will be spending some time wrapping duct tape around your hands and ripping it off to extract them from just under your epidermis.
Preparation is easy enough if you take the right precautions - cut the ends off, make an incision and then invert the fruit so that a juicy sphere falls out of the skin. This edible part has a taste that can only be described as exactly halfway between a cucumber and a watermelon, while not being more recognizable as one or the other.
That guide says that you can just eat the whole thing, seeds and all, but they're much more formidable seeds than either of its taste neighbours and I found it to be like swallowing an unpleasant spoonful of slightly juicy lumps. Therefore I put it in a blender and turned it into a juice to have the rest of it. It's a reasonably nice taste, but you don't get more than about a quarter of a cupful out of it, and you're always going to be paranoid about having let stray spines get into the part you're eating. With this risk-benefit analysis, I can find no real point to this fruit whatsoever. Blend a watermelon and cucumber together instead, and add a heap of red food colouring so that it stains your kitchen in an authentic manner.