What Hawaiian fruit to try

See if you can find purple malay apple

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Lilikoi (aka passionfruit). Also guava. You can find them in markets but also growing wild.

Wi apple (pronounced V-apple) is an asian fruit, not white sapote. It can be used unripe buy IMO is much better fully ripe.

This is on my bucket list.

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Since you have a car, a fascinating tour north of Hilo is Hawaiian Vanilla Farm Tour, North of Hilo - The Hawaii Vacation Guide
The tour guide explained the years of trial and error to figure out the perfect growing procedure. A gardening nerd’s love story. They also serve an expensive (I only just looked on!) lunch with vanilla infused in each course.
While you can’t return home with Hawaiian fruit, you can bring back vanilla pods for your friends.

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Watermelon papaya!

Today was Kauai. A hike in the jungle let me sample a few types of fruit.

Thimbleberry- like a small tart raspberry. Most weren’t ripe


Guava- I’m not sure what kind, but it was mostly seeds.

We saw a lot of strawberry guava plants. Per the guide, the fruits are smaller and you can eat the skins, but they are a bit tart and somewhat invasive.

Afterwards, we stopped to take pictures of a waterfall and some teanagers were selling yard-fruit at somewhat high prices. I paid $1 per banana and got 3 lilikoi for $2

I haven’t tried the lilikoi yet (it sounds like the wrinkled one might be about ready, but the other two need a day or two). The bananas were good, but not as good as the ones from Chinatown yesterday.

The bananas were thick and sweet with a somewhat fluffy texture. My wife thought the thimbleberry was too tart, but liked the hint of tart from yesterday’s bananas and thought they were better.

Here’s a pic of me composing this post, during a break from taking pics for my wife :grinning:

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It depends a lot on the variety and the genetics, but strawberry guava can be quite good, especially the yellow ones. I grow them and when fully ripe they’ve got a minty skin, soft pulp that tastes like juicy fruit gum mixed with poha berry, and are very juicy and sweet. The red ones I hear can be good too but are more tart and the skin is often astringent. Both are a bit seedy, but the seeds, while fairly hard, are not as big or rock hard as in those pink tropical guavas.

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Bob, if you go to Maui (I just got back 2wks ago), try and see if any of the local fruit stands have the annona/atemoya. I got a few and they were very good tasting. It may have been a custard apple, it had no label on the sign. Here’s a photo of the fruit, very firm flesh, taste good, not real sweet, just mild.

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That’s cherimoya and the one you have looks a little overripe. When they’re peak ripeness, they’re soooo sweet. I think cherimoya is like a cousin to custard apple :heart:

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If they are tart that means they’re unripe. When they’re fully ripe, it’s just a hint of tartness and sweet but not overwhelming sweet. I love guava and am determined to grow them in the pnw :sweat_smile:

Nop, pretty sure it is not a cherimoya. I have about 25 different varieties growing and it does not have this firm flesh, even though the outside skin looks over ripe, it is not. When I got the fruit it was all green, then I waited for it to turn color since it never got softer like a cherimoya.

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What type of cherimoya do you have because this is what I’ve known as cherimoya in Thailand and here in the US. A lot in internet photos say sugar apple is also cherimoya.

Custard apple is a term people use for almost all annona fruits says the internet. I know custard apple as the one with the fruit you pick apart.

Annona cherimola = cherimoya

What you show me with the browning and fruit skin look is what we would called a cherimoya. When they start to get brown like that, to me, that’s overripe. If they were stored in refrigeration, they won’t get soft, instead, they’ll spoil before getting soft. They won’t turn color except brown when overripe. The fruit will act differently depending on how it’s stored. Fresh from the tree without refrigeration, it’ll get soft. Refrigerated or radiated, it won’t get soft.

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This is atemoya:

Atemoya has dragon scale like pokes and i think is filipino in origin. Even the name sounds Filipino to me. We don’t have these in the area of Thailand that I’m from but we do have cherimoya everywhere.

Thats what sold in Florida as Cherimoya. A little firm, scaly but smooth skin and about the size of a fist. I got one and half this year down in the Fort Lauderdale area. Even my half cherimoya never got that soft.

As @Melon said, custard apple just means “in the annona family”. Everything from soursop to pond apple gets called custard apple by some group of people. Sugar apples are usually smaller and have hard scales, atemoya are usually spikey. It could be an ilama (annona diversifolia) by virtue of the fact that they have so much variance, but a green, smooth ilama would be the lamest variety I’ve ever seen.

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I’m actually there right now. Where did you get it from?

I forgot to mention that if they’re picked really unripe, refrigerated for shipment, and then given to the consumer, they’ll never fully ripen and get soft.

To get them soft, you need it picked almost ripe. Then refrigeration won’t matter because they do ripen at room temperatures but when picked too soon, they don’t have the ability to actually ripen and get soft. I don’t know the science behind it but it’s the same with with Mango as well. If picked too early, they won’t be able to ripen properly if you want them ripe.

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Most big to moderately sized Asian stores will sell them when they’re in season. They get them shipped to the US wholesale from Thailand and Vietnam.

I know in Colorado they sold them at HMart, Pacific Market, and a few other smaller Asian stores.

Here in the PNW, they’re in every large sized Asian store and some small ones even.

In California, they’re in all of the big and moderate sized stores too that I’ve been to.

I know some growers in Florida but they’re selling their farmland due to the increase in severe weather.

It is Thanksgiving, so not much is open today. But I was able to find a couple of small grocery stores which had some fruit.

They called this one Cotton. It is an interesting sweet tart and peels like an orange, but the seeds are very big.

We were able to sample some starfruit when we went on a waterfall hike. It was somewhere between an apple and a nectarine. Good flavor.


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Interesting. The Cherimoya here I can only basically find in Mexican markets. Think a lot of them come from South or Central America. Think I read that is where Cherimoya from. The Andes so tend to do better in the colder zones.
They’re usually pretty spendy about $12 per lb. But so good I took one last year and planted some seeds. Gave away 5 of them and kept one that’s about 5 foot tall now. If it survives the winter I’ll plant it in ground. My friend from Vietnam gave me a small Atemoya. Was thinking about trying to graft a piece onto the larger Cherimoya but not sure. He said people over there in the city grow them on their rooftops in containers so I might just do that with the Atemoya.

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Yeah in Thailand, around Chiangmai, we had a lot of that as well but we didn’t have atemoya. To me, atemoya is more filipino, even in name as well. There’s a lot of fruits i haven’t had as well but I’m mostly over here only in the pnw overall.

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