Life-altering Fruit

In my nearly never ending quest to find interesting foods and ingredients I keep a weather eye out for strange stuff on grocery shelves. I like the idea that merely one block away from your house is a place that holds the key to all these new experiences, experiences brought sometimes from half-way around the world.

This time I was in, of all places, a Wally World. Now, I try to avoid shopping here, but my nocturnal habits make it a necessary evil. It isn’t a place where I seek out the weird as far as food’s concerned (plenty of OTHER weird things happening in a Wally World to make up for it).

We were in the veggie and fruit sector when I saw something I had never seen before: TAMARILLO, it said, From NEW ZEALAND. Who was I to argue? There they lay, deep red with a slight shine to them, a lush burgundy waiting.

I picked it up. “What is it?” I asked my husband. “No clue,” he said, peering at the non-existent description that reasonably might have been under it in a Publix.

It was surrounded by peppers hot and peppers mild. “Maybe it’s some kind of hot pepper?” I asked hopefully. But there was no one to ask. Even at the best of times there is a distinct lack of knowledge amongst the produce handlers at a Wally World. Besides, there wasn’t a blue vest in sight.

So I took home my tamarillo. The tiny thing cost nearly $2 and confused our poor checkout girl. She helplessly flipped through her vegetable charts as the line behind us grew.

“Crap,” my husband said, looking back at the line of weary customers behind us “We’re THOSE people.” People of course, who hold up a line by having a ridiculously exotic item without a tag.

But we did make it through the line.

At home, I eyed my tamarillo as one would a potential nemesis. What was it? I wondered if I should just plunge a knife into it and find out.

And then there was the lure of the world wide web. Surely I could find out there. After all, the thing was in WAL-MART, it couldn’t be that terribly out of the ordinary.

To the interweb I went.

It wasn’t a pepper.

It wasn’t even a vegetable.

It was a fruit.

When I finally sliced it open, the center was filled with tiny, edible seeds, surrounded by a mild flesh. The taste of the tart fruit could best be described as a cross between tangerine and grapefruit. The texture in the center was a bit like pomegranate and the flesh around the center was the texture of a soft pear, a little less tart than the center of the fruit. I ended up loading it with brown sugar and scooping it from each half.

The tartness of the fruit lends itself well to chutneys, and it’s eaten as a breakfast fruit. It can be added to just about anything for just a bit of a mystery “zing.”

For recipes and a brief history of the fruit go to http://www.tamarillo.com