Chirimoya

Wow. This is one amazing bit of fruit. I tried them for the first time in Chile. Oh, there's such cheap fruit in Chile they use raspberries to make juice! Can you imagine - going to a cafe and just grabbing a glass of fresh raspberry juice? There was a nice cafe run by a Kiwi woman where they made a chirimoya juice - one sip and I was a convert. The texture is creamy so the juice is more like a smoothie - hence the English name 'custard apple'.

But you know, I like the name chirimoya. I learnt a tongue-twister about it:

Comí chirimoyas, me enchirimoyé,
ahora para desenchirimoyarme,
cómo me desenchirimoyaré.



The flavour of chirimoya has been compared to a kind of banana-pineapple-vanilla-strawberry thing.
They are in season here at the moment (locally grown - but then locally grown in Western Australia doesn't mean much - WA is bigger than most countries). Even though they are in season they are still mightily expensive $5-6 each! So after eyeing them up in the market for a couple of weeks...I bought ONE. Yes, a whole blog post about one piece of fruit.
To eat one, just make sure it's ripe - a bit soft. Then peel/cut off skin and remove seeds - the flesh will be in pieces by now - that's ok. Either eat as is or you can put it in the freezer for about 30 minutes and eat as sorbet. Or blend to make a smoothie.