Eating Pufferfish Fruit

Blame it on “Deep Space Nine”. The Prof and I have been watching it through from the beginning. We’re on season seven, the last season, about halfway through.

In several episodes, props have included fresh exotic fruit. Sometimes the fruit has been altered in some way; in the episode we watched last night the fruit was a watermelon that had been painted a dark purple-black color. Other times the props included natural exotics such as star fruit and kiwis and those spiky yellow globes that look like tangerine colored inflated puffer fish.

I’ve stared at those little puffer fish fruit in the grocery store for years. I had no idea what to do with them, but they were cute. They looked like they needed to be adopted and taken home and given names and taught to come when called.

Then I watched the episode of Deep Space Nine where Quark is carrying around a platter of exotic fruit at a reception and one of the puffer fish is cross sectioned.

I somehow always imagined that the inside would be white, like a fruit or a pear, with little pips in it. It never dawned on me that the inside would be lime green, with little melon seeds.

So I looked it up on the web. I found this great little site How to eat a Kiwano (Horned Melon). That did it. The little puffer fish fruit suddenly became Kiwanos, and fair game for the knife.

While the “How to eat Kiwano” site tries to explain what the inside of the fruit is like, I still wasn’t prepared for the juicy little single-seed packets that spilled out when I sliced the fruit in half.

They reminded me of much larger versions of the little individual juice packets inside an orange section. Each had a melon type seed inside, which the instructions said you could either spit out or eat. The how-to-eat instructions claim that the seeds have no taste, but I found they actually had a mild taste similar to pumpkin seeds.

As for the fruit itself, it tastes like a mild lemon-lime citrus concoction. The “How to Eat Kiwano” site said this indicates that the fruit was picked before it was ripe, and allowed to ripen off the vine. Apparently if the fruit ripens before it is picked it tastes more like a banana. Since the fruit is native to the Kalahari Desert, I doubt very much that I’ll be tasting ripened-on-the-vine any time soon. There’s a good chance that my fruit is a product of California, since it is now being raised domestically there. Even then, fully ripened fruit only has a shelf life of three or four days, so unless I make it to the Left Coast I’ll have to settle for the lemon-lime flavor of Kiwano. Not a problem, since I’m not crazy about bananas anyway.

I’m glad I did this little culinary experiment, even if I do feel a little guilty about sucking the life out of one of the little orange puffer fish fruits. I’ll probably have more little puffer fish fruit lives on my conscience before my days of fruit sucking are ended. But even after having sampled and enjoyed the guts of a Kiwano, I remain enamored of their plump little cuteness. They taste good, but they’d still make neat pets. They even have little tails.