All the fruits

This is a post that has been in the making since some time in March. I've took my time, trying to gather as many of the fruits here as I can. They're not all local, but they're all fruit that I've run into during my time here. I am going to miss them so much. It's all apples and bananas in Finland, and maybe some citruses in the winter. I've also left out bananas and melons and mangoes and pineapples other stuff that I was already well familiar with before coming here, because sure, I could be all "here's a picture of a honeydew melon!", but that wouldn't really tell anyone anything new. So I'm concentrating on the more exotic fruits, from a Finnish perspective.

Ok, I'll start with a couple of fruits that aren't sweet, so they're actually eaten as real food, instead of as... well, fruit. But I wanted to include them anyway, because they are everywhere here.

Tucumã (aka. Astrocaryum aculeatum) is a palm fruit. A lot of things here are palm fruits. So many palms fruits. As you can see from the picture, it has a huge black seed inside it, and the orange fruit is cut off the seed in flakes like that. You could probably also eat it some other way, but I haven't seen anyone eat it any other way here. Actually people often buy ready-flaked tucumã. I bought the whole ones, because I wanted to get a picture of it, and learned pretty fast why I see people more often buying the flakes instead of the whole fruit: because they are a pain to flake. The skin isn't easy to get off. You actually have to cut it off, and if you want to save as much of what little edible part it has you have to cut close but not too close to the surface. And tucumã has more fat in it than I ever realised just eating the flakes, so it actually gets slippery in your hands. And it has a kind of stringy consistency that makes it harder to cut than if it was just even. It took me some 45 minutes to get through six of those. Though I suppose the people who sell these (usually on the streets) and spend their days peeling and flaking while selling are pretty good at it. So in the future, I'll just leave it to them.
The taste isn't very strong, it's kind of creamy actually, except that it has some sharpness to it that in the beginning made me wonder whether the fruit has gone bad. But it hasn't. That's just how it tastes. Though I'd guess the sharpness gets stronger the longer the flakes sit in the fridge. The taste actually reminds me a bit of olives. I mean, they taste absolutely nothing like olives. But the point is this: I like olives. They are so good. But if you start to think about the taste, it's not actually a pleasant taste at all. And yet somehow, despite the fact that the taste itself isn't really good, the thing is good. I don't really know if anyone knows what I mean. But anyway, that's how I feel about tucumã too. The taste isn't actually good (like I said, I couldn't in the beginning tell if it had gone bad. I probably still can't.), but somehow tucumã is still good. The world is sometimes weird that way.

Pupunha (aka. peach-palm, aka. Bactris gasipaes) is unsurprisingly also a palm fruit. It was the first local fruit that I ran into when I got here, though that was mostly a coincidence, since I had pupunha twice during my first week and a half here, after which the next time was mid-May. For a while I actually thought pupunha and tucumã were the same fruit, because they're both orange and the texture of the fruit is kind of the same, by which I mean both are made of kind of strands, and you have to peel the skin off to eat it, and then there's a seed inside. Although, now that I'm eating them again after getting to know tucumã well, I can tell they are nothing alike, and not only because tucumãs are bigger. Also because 1. tucumã is basically always eaten as flakes, while pupunha is never eaten as flakes, because if you tried to flake it, all you would get is crumbs, and 2. they taste nothing alike. Pupunha has a kid of buttery taste, which is odd, because that is not what I would expect from a thing that looks like that, and because the consistency is actually quite dry as in definitely not juicy, and "buttery" and "dry" are not words that in my head fit together.

Ok, then to the fruits that are fruits by any possible definition of the word. 

Biribá (aka. wild sugar-apple aka. Rollinia deliciosa) is big, a weird-looking spikey thing. The taste is quite mild, but it's sweet and soft and pleasant. You just cut the fruit in half and eat it with a spoon. Biribá is one of my favorites here, it's really good. Though I have a feeling I'm going to say that about a lot of the fruits on this list.
When I was first given this fruit I was like great, for a change a fruit whose name I'll be able to remember. Because (to those of you who know nothing about capoeira), there's this instrument called berimbau, and the name biribá is almost like that, except shorter. And then I went to wikipedia to check if it tells me something interesting about this fruit I could tell you, and ooooh, young biribá (it's a tree) are used for the bow of a berimbau, that's why it's called a berimbau. (According to wikipedia, the citation for this is missing there, though. If there's any capoeira people out there reading this, could you tell me if this is true?)

Cupuaçu (aka. Theobroma grandiflorum) is a relative of cacau. Which you can also figure out by looking at the scientific names, because they're closely enough related to be in the same genus. The relation is also really obvious from the fact that the structure of the fruit is basically exactly the same. Cupuaçu has more fruit in it, and the outside is covered in this brown fuzz-king of thing, but other than that, the fruit looks really similar.
It tastes very different, though. While cacau doesn't have a very strong taste, cupuaçu does. Even more so when eating the actual fruit than when it's made into a juice and sugar added. (I was going to make juice out of that fruit I got, but then I couldn't quite figure out how to do that without a blender or something, so I just ate it. I can have the juice basically any time I want.) The taste is actually quite lemon-y, though it's not nearly as sour as a lemon. It's a taste that is good also just eating the fruit without any added sugar.
Ok, so here's what Wikipedia has to say about the taste: "The white pulp of the cupuaçu has an odour described as a mix of chocolate and pineapple and is frequently used in desserts, juices and sweets. The juice tastes primarily like a pear, with a hint of banana." I wholeheartedly disagree. I smell no chocolate and definitely don't taste banana. I guess the smell is similar to a pineapple, and now that someone mentions it I guess it has a taste that has a hint of pear to it. But a citrus is what it reminds me most of all.
Cupuaçu is everywhere here, mostly in juices and ice creams and stuff like that. Whatever you can put fruit pulp into. I love it.

Açaí (aka. Euterpe oleracea) is another palm tree. You may notice that the thing in the picture does not look like a fruit. That's because I can't find the fruit itself. I asked more than one person and they all said the same thing: the only way to find açaí the fruit instead of açaí the pulp is to come across a tree in the field that happens to have some. The seeds are easy to find, though, because they make jewellery out of them here. Earrings and bracelets and necklaces. So I know the seeds are round, ~0.5 cm in diameter. But I haven't seen the whole fruits at any point. But apparently they're quire small and round too, so I'm assuming they're kinda like cherries in size and general idea of structure. Some fruit on top and a seed in the middle. Wikipedia tells be that the seed is about 80% of the fruit's mass. So apparently not a big fruit at all.
Either way, the pulp is very easy to find here, because it's really typical here. You take the pulp, and then you add some (or a lot of) sugar, because the pulp itself is not sweet at all, and then you add some granola or oat flakes or this yet again different form of cassava that I think looks like styrofoam balls, except they're hard and made of cassava instead of plastic. I haven't seen it used for anything other than eaten with açaí. So you add one or more of things like that, and then you eat it. I don't have any of those things, so I'm just eating the açaí plain. With sugar, of course, because while the pulp isn't bad without sugar, it isn't especially good either, while with sugar it's very good. So how does it taste? Purple. It tastes purple. I don't know. You try describing tastes that are like nothing you've ever tasted before. But seriously, I do think açaí tastes purple, the same way those red bananas tasted red(der than other bananas). 

Cubiu (aka. Solanum sessiliflorum, I think) is a relative of tomato's, which makes sense, since it has the same structure, except you can only eat the thing with the seeds within the lobes.It's not a sweet fruit, it's sour, but not so sour that you wouldn't be able to just eat it, like lemons are. Although it is sour enough that a bit of sugar would make it better. The woman I bought it from told me it's used in for example juices, and I can imagine it would make a great juice. Also because it's a very juicy fruit, by which I mean I have to have a plate underneath when eating it to avoid making a mess.
But sour alone doesn't cover the taste, because sour can still taste like a lot of things. My first thought as I tasted it was that it tastes like swamp. Not swamp water, obviously, but the connection that my brain made was to something that grows in the Finnish swamps. I just can't put my finger on what it is. My first thought was marsh Labrador tea (is apparently the English name for suopursu. For those of you not from Finland: it's this knee-high plant that doesn't have any part you could eat, but it has a strong smell, and it grows all over pretty much all the swamps there, so that's basically what swamp smells like), but I'm not entirely sure if it's because the cubiu tastes like what they smell like, or because that's the first smell/taste that comes to the mind of a Finnish person (or at least me) when thinking of a swamp. Anyone here who has eaten these and been to a Finnish swamp and could offer some insight? 

Caju (aka. cashew aka. Anacardium occidentale) has a fruit. Is a thing I knew. Well, all plants that produce seeds technically have fruits, but I mean the kind of fruit people mean when they say fruit, not the biological fruit. Anyway, what I didn't know is that also the fruits are eaten. Now I do. When I went out into the field, there were so many cashew-trees around (actually there's also a lot of them around in the city too, I just didn't notice them before I knew that's what a cashew-tree looks like), all with fruits of differing levels of ripeness. Most of the ripe fruits were actually yellow, but a couple of the trees had orange-reddish fruits, and I thought they looked better than the yellow one, so that's the picture you get.
So what is a cashew-fruit like? It tastes like apple. I'm not kidding. I picked one of those out of the tree and smelled it, and my immediate thought was that it smells exactly like some variety of apple that grows in our parent's garden. I'm not entirely sure which one, because the smell was enough out of context, but it was definitely a smell that's everywhere there in the end of August. So I ate it, and it also tastes exactly like it smells. Obviously the taste isn't exactly like an apple, but it's really, really close. Also, apples are crunchy, and the cashew-fruit is very much not. They have a kind of... rubbery texture. By which I mean if you bite into it, it first squishes a bit before the teeth actually sink into it. Enough so that it's easier to eat it in pieces than try to eat the fruit whole. It's also really juicy.

Then a few fruits I've been informed are not actually local fruits, but I have them here anyway, because they're not fruits that you find fresh in Finland, but are quite common here. And they're good.

Cacau (aka. cocoa, aka Theobroma cacao) is a thing everyone knows. Because this is the fruit they make chocolate out of. Well, they make chocolate out of the seeds. The white thing around the seeds is the actual fruit, and that's also edible. Is a thing I didn't know. I didn't actually know what it looked like inside at all until I was handed one with a "here, have some cacau fruit". Ok, these aren't actually common here. The time I had this cacau fruit was the only time I saw a cacau fruit during the entire time. Chocolate I saw plenty, though. I wanted to include it anyway, partly because I can, and partly because I thought it was interesting to see the actual fruit.
The taste of this one isn't very strong. Most of what I remember about eating it (that was less than 24 hours ago, from when I'm writing this bit) was how hard it was to get the fruit off the seeds. So basically you just pop a seed or two (the white blobs) into your mouth, and try to suck the white stuff off of the seed (that's actually black, somewhere underneath it all). The thing is, the pulp of the fruit is quite a thin layer on the fruit, and it was tightly attached. So soon my tongue was hurting from trying to suck the pulp of the seeds. But it must have been good, because I just kept eating it despite the effort it took to eat it. And then, once you've eaten the white stuff, you just throw the seeds out, which is somehow crazy because the seeds is where the chocolate comes from. But I guess you have to do quite a bit of things to the seeds before it's actually something that tastes good. 

Jambu (aka. Syzygium jambos) is apparently originally from Asia, but is all over the place here. Not the fruit. The tree. During my time here I have seen the trees burst into flowers, and then the flowers die, and the fruits grow in, and drop. And ok, then there are fruits everywhere, but they're on the ground. The flowers are pink and fluffy, and as the flowers started dying, the pink fluff-petals were everywhere. Anyway, I didn't eat the fruits until I found them sold, because I don't exactly trust the fruit in the trees that just grow somewhere as decorative trees, and then my housemate laughed at me for having bought them, because apparently no one buys them. They just are everywhere.
Anyway, the fruit reminds me of a cherry, both based on flavor, though it isn't as strong as a cherry's flavor, at least compared to the cherries I'm used to, and structure and consistency. They don't have the long stalk and are way bigger than any cherry, but still. I had no idea what to expect as I got them, so I just cut it in half, including the stone, without even noticing there was a stone inside, so the stone also isn't nearly as hard as in cherries.

Maracujá (aka. passionfruit, aka. Passifora edulis) is a fruit we actually know in Finland. I suppose we don't actually eat the fruit, but it's in juices and ice creams and candy.
Except. The one I was familiar with and the one that's always in the pictures in Finland is the passionfruit with the purple skin. Not here. The local fruit are orange, and the inedible white thing around the seeds is thicker than in the purple version. They didn't even know there were purple versions of this fruit until I saw these for the first time and was like wait, why is this passionfruit orange? But these orange ones and the purple ones are apparently the same species, just some different variety or something. I have to say, I like the purple one better (based on the couple of odd times over my life when I've had passionfruit somewhere). The taste is basically the same, except this orange one is milder. And as someone who really likes the taste of these fruits, I like the taste stronger. (Or maybe I just remember completely wrong and it's not actually stronger in the purple ones, and I just think that because the taste is usually concentrated to use in the ice cream or whatever.) 

Mamão (aka. papaya aka. Carica papaya) is a fruit that is mostly known in Finland as a dried fruit. They're the orange cubes in the dried fruit mixes and mueslis and stuff. I always liked the dried papaya in those. My first encounter with fresh papaya was actually five years ago in Australia. I tasted a bit there, and didn't like it. I don't know what I was thinking back then (or maybe I just happened to taste a bad papaya), but it's actually good. The dried version gives an ok idea of what it tastes like fresh. Except. (And this is kinda important when trying to describe a taste.) The dried papaya I know is really sweet. I assume they add sugar to it while drying. And yeah, I know that when a fruit is dried the sugar concentrates (obviously, because you remove the water), so the dried fruit is sweeter than the fresh one. But the thing is, papaya isn't actually very sweet. I mean, it's a fruit, of course it's sweet compared to most things, but as fruits go, it's not all that sweet. So I have a hard time believing the dried version would have as much sugar as it has if it only had the fruit's own sugar.
Ok, so this is interesting. Wikipedia tells me that "Two kinds of papayas are commonly grown. One has sweet, red or orange flesh, and the other has yellow flesh." So the yellow one is even less sweet? You know what, maybe that's the kind I tasted in Australia, because my recollection was even less sweet than the papayas here turned out to be. 

Goiaba (aka. guava aka. Psidium guajava, I saved the best for the last) is a taste that is literally everywhere here. Seriously. You have the juices, cookies, ice creams. If it's a sweet thing, you can get it goiaba-falvored. And yet, somehow, I was able to find myself some fresh goiabas only after I had been here for over two months. Granted, I wasn't looking very hard, with all the other things going on, but I was keeping my eye out on them. It's also perfectly possible that I simply didn't recognise them if I saw some, since I'd only seen the juices and ice creams, and they don't give a very good image (or an image at all) of what the fruit actually looks like. Anyway, the fruit isn't quite as sweet as I expected, when I tried it the first time. Probably because the juices and cookies probably have some (or a lot) sugar added to them. The consistency is kind of grainy, which my mouth finds odd. The taste is... it tastes like tropical fruit. I mean, if I think of what "tropical fruit" tastes like, it's basically mango and/or passionfruit and/or goiaba.
This is the moment I get distracted reading the Wikipedia page, but: "Guava is a popular snack in Taiwan, sold on many street corners and night markets during hot weather, accompanied by packets of dried plum powder mixed with sugar and salt for dipping." Whaaaat!? Dried plum powder is a thing? What's that like? Also, apparently there is a reason why goiaba is used in all the things: "Because of its high level of pectin, guavas are extensively used to make candies, preserves, jellies, jams, and marmalades." Yeah, I've noticed.
But yeah, goiaba is good. It's definitely one of my favorites.

So there you go. The fruits I happened to run into while I was here. I was also told about a lot of other fruits, but I never got to taste or see them. Apparently there are quite a lot of fruits here that are local and grow around, but that no one sells. Which means it's very hard to actually find them to eat. Instead people eat pineapples and bananas and papayas and melons, none of which are native to here. I think. Pineapples might be.

Either way. That's all from me today. I'll write again next week, when I get back to the internet.

~matu