Fun fruits

I also ate a lot of fruit while in Taiwan.  There is nothing uniquely Taiwanese or particularly exotic about any of them, but they were all new to me.

It’s wax apple season right now.  Known in Chinese as lian wu, they’re called “wax apples” in English because of their appearance.  As far as taste and texture, they’re comparable to Asian pears, a bit tarter, with the crispness of airy Styrofoam.

The best new fruit experience were these Buddha head fruits, so-called because of their resemblance to depictions of the Sakyamuni Buddha’s hair.  Eaten with a spoon, the fruit is creamy and sweet (hence the English name, custard apple) and contains hard seed pods like those of a lychee.  Some people find this fruit almost sickly sweet, but not as much as a durian.

In contrast, a tart prickly pear passionfruit, which was served as part of a Japanese kaiseki meal I had, was also eaten with a spoon and the seeds were snappy and popped like pomegranate seeds.

I also had a lot of guava, which was crisp and not as sweet as the canned juice we have in America.  I’d been introduced to regular small jujubes last year, but this was the first time I’d seen giant jujubes, which were not as sweet as the smaller variety but had the same texture, like a firm apple.