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.

Comments

[kibet.livejournal.com]

When I saw it was named Dosakai, I thought it must have been Japanese but I see it in from India. I was thinking some sort of water melon variety as well. Although it is worth noting that Watermelon and Cucumber are pretty similar to each other anyway, in both taste and smell. I think from memory, watermelon may be sweeter in smell or may be other way around. I think they may even be from the same family too, although not sure where the traditional melon fits in here.

[davidn]

I thought that too, from the name - it's a very Japanese-sounding arrangement of consonants and vowels. Most of the more unrecognizable things that I saw there came from Japan, but there were a few which could surely only have been from Mars - I think that I'll have to keep on getting something I don't recognize and then report back on it every time we go there.

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

I used to get confused by all of the exotic vegetables you can buy in some of the shops in Edinburgh, so, being me, I made up names for all of the stuff that I didn't recognise. Now I know what some of it is, but I still think that "hairy potato" is a better name for the cassava, and the bitter melon should be renamed "warty cucumber"

[davidn]

Those would be more memorable to me :) Although yesterday I was calling it by name, 'dosakai', at every opportunity just in fascination that there was this vegetable that I hadn't known existed until the day before. If using that naming scheme, it may become the infamous not-a-melon.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

By chance, did you happen to see some Romanesco Broccoli (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesco_broccoli)? It's not as round at the ends that I'm used to...

[davidn]

Yes! Whitney called it "broccoflower", as mentioned in the article. It has that uncanny look to it that comes from being not quite the same as something you're familiar with (and being suspiciously logarithmic doesn't help with this feeling), like a cauliflower imported from another dimension.

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

Snozzcumber, surely?

[davidn]

Given what was there, I'm pretty sure that somewhere in that market, on one of the bottom shelves, they're going to have those.

[kjorteo]

Just make sure your random "pick a mystery fruit and eat it" adventures never lead you anywhere near durians. I've never had one, but my rule of thumb is that if even the Bizarre Foods guy can't handle them, then they must not be fit for human consumption.

[davidn]

I've heard of them but never tried one either, and that's the kind of hostile fruit that I mean - you could kill a decent-sized person with that. I don't imagine that I would find it particularly appetizing from its appearance, but as it says that people's taste buds are aligned to either love or hate it, I might be one of the safe ones. But I doubt it.

I have to question the inclusion of "pie and mash" on a list of bizarre foods that is otherwise around the level of "ovary soup".