Thursday, August 23, 2007

Mangosteen - the queen of fruits


The electrician who was rewiring some lights in the renovated bathroom brought some of these fruits from his kebun (farm) in Papar, a small town about 40km from Kota Kinabalu. According to him this year's mangosteen harvest is so abundant it exceeded the demand and the price for one kilo is only about RM2 and still dropping. Good news for us mangosteen lovers!!





This is how the queen of fruits are served in Japan! Very befittingly so. It certainly looked so much more refined and elegant as to how we would get at the flesh but I find it so much more troublesome and that it requires a knife.

I had so much fun taking these pictures and took so much time that nobody wants to eat the fruits anymore. So I sat down with a dessert fork and imagined myself in Japan!
Wonder how much they (the Japanese) have to fork out to eat one of these.

This is how we open the beauty...


Remove the stump (that was actually the flower). Press softly on the sides until it cracks open.


Voila! Here is the melt-in-the mouth flesh of the mangosteen.


Look at the five raised brown ridges, that translates to five segments of flesh inside. Smaller and more ridges would meant more and smaller flesh inside. The number of ridges a fruit has at its bottom corresponds to the number of segments you will find inside the fruit.

4 comments:

Terri @ A Daily Obsession said...

wow, great post!can almost taste d fruits. i've been having too much durians;shd balance it by going over to ur hse for mangosteens.

Anonymous said...

I agree with terri. These are some really really good pictures.

From my colleagues in the office, I received a lot of looks of incredulity today. I told them that I didn't understand the sheer greatness of the mangosteen.

Guri, Heather and Shanni simply stared at me like I had gone mad.

I later qualified then that my entire family - my mom, wife, granny, aunties, and female cousins are simply crazy about mangosteens, it was me that just didn't 'get it'.

And with that, I'd like to just say that these photos are simply excellent.

cheers//lcchan

a feast, everyday said...

terri, lcchan: tq, my head is hugh now.

Deana E said...

Wow..you are really good at taking pictures..the mangosteens look so yummy