What's My Fruit?

[davidn]

This weekend, Whitney and I took a shopping bag out and boldly went one and a half miles to a family-run supermarket that's very popular in the area. I had thought from the description that it was a small corner shop, but as I discovered when we arrived, it's a large sort of combined market and garden centre with products from all around the world.

What fascinated me the most were the fruits and vegetables on display, which started off as recognizable on the displays outside but quickly turned into ones that I had never seen before - things that looked like familiar ones such as apples or cauliflowers but were a different colour or longer or thinner, to things that just defied description or comparison to anything I'd seen before, which were purple and yellow or covered in Fibonacci-sequenced huge spikes. Faced with this interplanetary array, I decided to get one to try for ourselves, but kept my ambitions down by selecting one of the ones that didn't look actively hostile.

I wanted to try it completely blind before looking up what it was, but Whitney made the very good point that it might be poisonous when raw or only edible by dogs, so we looked up its name online when we got home.

This is a dosakai (or "dosekai", as labelled, which may be an alternative or a mistake) and despite its miniature watermelon-like appearance, it's a variety of cucumber. What's inside bears a lot of resemblance to a large version of that vegetable - it has a pale green sort of flesh with a more watery translucent circle in the middle where the seeds are. According to what we looked up, it's not recommended to eat the skin, though Americans don't eat the skin on the normal long, green variety of cucumber anyway.

The taste is... rather a lot like cucumber, but with a tougher texture (or maybe this one isn't ripe yet). In the middle, though, this changes into something almost like a lemon - the seeds are soft, so you can eat them, but the taste is a bit too sour to eat as part of a salad or anything. There are various recipes for using it as part of a curry.