Dragon Fruit

I spotted this unusual beauty at the fruit stand yesterday afternoon. It was sliced in half and wrapped in plastic film but the little sticker attached only offered the weight and price. "What is this? A prickly pear maybe? I asked Tom to wait with the baby while I ran up to the salesperson and asked. "It's a fruit, kind of tastes like a Kiwi" was the answer. Well, this I had to try. When we returned to the apt. later that evening Tom looked it up online and found this description:

This climbing cactus is one of the most beautiful and wide spread members of the Cactaceae family. The magnificent night blooming white flowers can be up to14 inches in diameter. The fruit is most often eaten chilled and cut in half so the flesh may be spooned out. The juice is used in frozen drinks and it is in a new Tropicana Twister flavor. The red fruit are high in lycopene which is a natural antioxidant that is known to fight cancer and heart disease. source: Pine Island Nursery

A little further searching online on my part resulted in a site on how to grow them from seed and from the same Pine Island Nursery site I quoted above, a page on all the different varieties. Who knew!

So what did I think? I'm sorry to report that I was a little disappointed. The fruit I bought must have been a little under ripe because it really didn't have much of a taste at all. It certainly tasted nothing like kiwi to me. The texture and consistency of the flesh reminded me of kiwi and also of prickly pear but that's about it. I could just barely detect a sweetness to the fruit and I wonder if had it been riper would it have been sweeter. One thing I did like was the seeds. They were crunchy and each spoonful of flesh yeided a mouthful of seeds for me to pop and crunch between my teeth. FUN! I'd love to try this fruit again. I always like to give something three chances before I completely write it off. I'll be on the lookout for another.

Written by Deb on January 5, 2006 08:16 AM