I'm excited to try these! I love discovering new fruits.
In the same vein -- is there any website that catalogues all the fruits you can buy around the world? That documents all the varieties, together with which countries/states/cities you can find them in?
When I travel, discovering new fruits is one of my favorite parts. Like when I discovered the custard apple [1] in Brazil, it blew my mind.
And it would be really cool to have a list of all the fruits you could buy when you travel to make sure you don't miss any. Or the fact that the article says tejocotes are sold in NYC -- when I've never come across them -- makes me wonder what other fruits are here that I also had no idea?
Fast-forward 100 years into the future, 20 years after we discovered that also plants were sentient and have feelings too, and some news corporation will run a story about how crazy the 2000s were, since people were openly eating fruit and seemingly people cheered them on.
It's not as uncommon here as tejocotes, but I'm always chuffed to find good looking and not overripe mangosteens at farmers markets or specialty produce suppliers.
They're more common to find at Asian markets, where they often come in mesh bags of a half dozen, but my experience is they're often overripe and their fruit has become slightly translucent and mushy.
You can identify a ripe mangosteen by a rich reddish purple exterior that gives slightly when pressed. If it's darkened to a blackish purple and is very hard to the touch, it is probably over-ripened.
They are very rare at farmer's markets though. Growing them in the USA in most places requires a greenhouse as they need a tropical climate: year round high humidity and a minimum temperature of ~55-60F.
> the article says tejocotes are sold in NYC… makes me wonder what other fruits are here that I also had no idea?
I just popped in to ask the same question! I’ve been trying to find fresh lingonberries every Thanksgiving for years. You’d think that one could find anything in a city of this size, but >99% of it is just bodega bodega bodega
Yeah, pinha in the northeast where they're pretty common. In the south, a native seed/nut is called pinha (it's a "pine" nut that is entirely different from the Mediterranean type of pine nut).
IIRC pinha the fruit is not native to Brasil, but to the Indian sub-continent like so many other amazing tropical fruits.
I would suggest for anyone looking for novel fruits in the northeast of Brasil, check out "Ingá", the variety that has the nickname "ice cream bean"[1]
"Authorities were worried that tejocotes could carry highly destructive fruit flies into the States, threatening domestic orchards. Soon, there was a black market for the golden fruits, due to their rarity and the effort it took to bring them over the border."
In the same vein -- is there any website that catalogues all the fruits you can buy around the world? That documents all the varieties, together with which countries/states/cities you can find them in?
When I travel, discovering new fruits is one of my favorite parts. Like when I discovered the custard apple [1] in Brazil, it blew my mind.
And it would be really cool to have a list of all the fruits you could buy when you travel to make sure you don't miss any. Or the fact that the article says tejocotes are sold in NYC -- when I've never come across them -- makes me wonder what other fruits are here that I also had no idea?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annona_squamosa