Rambut means “hair” in Indonesian, giving a hint as to where this spunky little fruit got its name. With a thick outer peel covered in small rubbery hairs, a rambutan opens up to reveal a milky-translucent colored fruit hugging an almond shaped pit.
A bit like a grape both in taste and texture, the fruit can be really sweet, or a bit tart if plucked from the tree before their peak ripeness. While some varieties remain light green or yellow even after they have ripened, you can usually tell the fruit inside will be sweet when its exterior is bright pink or red. Another tell-tale sign of ripeness? A group of ants running gleefully through the rambutan hair forest. Once the fruit passes its peak ripeness, sugary juice begins to seep through the rind and the six-legged competition becomes fiercer.
The flesh of a rambutan can easily be peeled or eaten right off of the pit but a course papery skin on the pit (totally edible but a bit annoying) also comes free all too readily. It’s somewhat of a practiced art getting the fruit off of the pit by itself, while leaving the temperamental skin behind, untouched.
The flesh of a rambutan can easily be peeled or eaten right off of the pit but a course papery skin on the pit (totally edible but a bit annoying) also comes free all too readily. It’s somewhat of a practiced art getting the fruit off of the pit by itself, while leaving the temperamental skin behind, untouched.
The rambutan season began around December. As the stands along the road selling fresh mangoes by the kilogram started to disappear, tables bearing red mountains of rambutan began to pop up in their place. At the average fruit stand you can buy a kilogram of the fruit, often sold still on the branches to preserve them, for 3,000 rupiah - the equivalent of about 30 cents USD. I have a few friends who have rambutan trees in front of their houses, thick bunches of the fruit hanging everywhere. A long bamboo pole with a hook fastened to the end is used harvest the fruit but you can also often find those hanging low enough to grab with bare hands.
Jambu (Guava)
It’s about the size of an apple and looks a bit like a pear; it’s pale and often lightly browned and bruised because of the tenderness of its flesh. From the outside the guava is an incredibly unremarkable fruit.
But one soft bite into a guava reveals unremarkable it is not.
It's all, POW! Hello, bright pink sweetness.
The skin is edible and often soft like a pear, though sometimes it will leave you with a bitter aftertaste. And many times the fruit itself packs a sour punch. That bright pink sweetness is the elusive ideal.
I didn't even know that this fruit existed until the end of my year in Indonesia. By that point I had made it my goal to try as many new fruits as my belly could bear before I left. I found this little guy at a small food stand that I biked past every day to and from school. The mangosteens were all shades of dark purple, and they radiated novelty in my foreign eyes. The woman behind the stand told me that mangosteen is a delicious fruit, and turning it over, she showed me how its bottom bears a clover design which reveals how many fruit segments you'll find inside. I was sold. I bought the fruit and raced home to symbolically add it to my fruit-eating résumé -- after snapping a few glamour shots on the patio.
Salak
If there ever were a fruit that could pull off leather jackets and look good on a fruit-sized Harley Davidson, this would be it. I challenge you to find a more badass food around. Its English name is snake fruit and I often mistook it for dragon fruit, but either way it definitely deserves a reptilian title. To harvest salak you walk down a narrow dirt path lined with small trees. Each one is made up of a cluster of thick stems that are covered in sharp thorns reaching out several inches in every direction. The trees' large fronds hang overhead, shading the path below. It's a carefully cultivated farm, and yet the field seems to wear the mask of a menacing jungle. Salak grows in bunches at the base of these trees so you squat (avoiding contact with the thorn laden ground) and, with a machete, begin to hack into the small branch bearing a good-sized bushel of fruit. It might take you a few strikes but eventually the fruits will come tumbling down. The fruits themselves still are covered with tiny needles that will spare none but the most calloused hands. The trick is to pick them up off the ground without actually touching them. This entails some sort of skilled maneuver using an untucked shirt, a glove, or a combination of bold, swift movements and yelps of pain.
After about 12 hours the thorns fall off and the scaly skin can be peeled off easily. But for the eager harvester who can't imagine waiting so long, breaking open the peel presents another dangerous challenge....
A seedy center makes up about 75% of the fruit, so it's pretty hard to avoid. Apparently it's totally fine to swallow the seeds, but they are just a little too big and I could never figure out how to coordinate that. So I would eat only about a quarter of the fruit before giving up on the rest.
With some sugar added and all the seeds strained away, guava juice (jus jambu) is probably the way to go.
Manggis (Mangosteen)
In Bahasa Indonesia mangga is the name for mango, manggis is the name for mangosteen, semangka is watermelon, and kemangi is a basil-like herb - now if that's not a disaster just waiting to happen... (for me and all the other non-native Indonesian speakers who like to keep our mangosteens and our pesto separate.)
I didn't even know that this fruit existed until the end of my year in Indonesia. By that point I had made it my goal to try as many new fruits as my belly could bear before I left. I found this little guy at a small food stand that I biked past every day to and from school. The mangosteens were all shades of dark purple, and they radiated novelty in my foreign eyes. The woman behind the stand told me that mangosteen is a delicious fruit, and turning it over, she showed me how its bottom bears a clover design which reveals how many fruit segments you'll find inside. I was sold. I bought the fruit and raced home to symbolically add it to my fruit-eating résumé -- after snapping a few glamour shots on the patio.
The soft, fleshy peel of the mangosteen tears open easily to reveal small white segments of fruit. The proper way to open these is by using a paring knife, slicing across the center and then neatly popping the rind right off - clearly I didn't get the memo. I assumed everyone just tore into the rind with their thumbs until I was flipping through my album of photos with my host sister and she stopped me to ask what I had done to this poor mangosteen. Next time...
The fruit itself is delicious. Most segments contain a seed about the size of an almond. The flesh surrounding it is soft and juicy, and it melts easily off of the seed. Mangosteen has a bright, concentrated flavor, and it's almost like a fruity simple syrup in its unwavering sweetness. Smaller segments contain smaller seeds, and sometimes you'll find a baby segment nestled in between two big pieces without any seed at all.
The fruit itself is delicious. Most segments contain a seed about the size of an almond. The flesh surrounding it is soft and juicy, and it melts easily off of the seed. Mangosteen has a bright, concentrated flavor, and it's almost like a fruity simple syrup in its unwavering sweetness. Smaller segments contain smaller seeds, and sometimes you'll find a baby segment nestled in between two big pieces without any seed at all.
Salak
If there ever were a fruit that could pull off leather jackets and look good on a fruit-sized Harley Davidson, this would be it. I challenge you to find a more badass food around. Its English name is snake fruit and I often mistook it for dragon fruit, but either way it definitely deserves a reptilian title. To harvest salak you walk down a narrow dirt path lined with small trees. Each one is made up of a cluster of thick stems that are covered in sharp thorns reaching out several inches in every direction. The trees' large fronds hang overhead, shading the path below. It's a carefully cultivated farm, and yet the field seems to wear the mask of a menacing jungle. Salak grows in bunches at the base of these trees so you squat (avoiding contact with the thorn laden ground) and, with a machete, begin to hack into the small branch bearing a good-sized bushel of fruit. It might take you a few strikes but eventually the fruits will come tumbling down. The fruits themselves still are covered with tiny needles that will spare none but the most calloused hands. The trick is to pick them up off the ground without actually touching them. This entails some sort of skilled maneuver using an untucked shirt, a glove, or a combination of bold, swift movements and yelps of pain.
After about 12 hours the thorns fall off and the scaly skin can be peeled off easily. But for the eager harvester who can't imagine waiting so long, breaking open the peel presents another dangerous challenge....
The fruit inside looks like large cloves of garlic. (Luckily the resemblance ends there.) It's sweet and slightly acidic, a bit like a honey crisp apple. Some varieties are crisp and juicy, while others are drier and almost crumbly. The crisp ones were my favorite, partly for the satisfying way each segment would pop of off its pit, leaving behind a smooth brown seed that looks remarkably like a chestnut. Another strange resemblance? When you first open a salak the white fruit inside is covered in a thin opaque inner layer of skin like the finicky membrane inside the shell of a hardboiled egg. It is edible, though, so you can take the time to rub the skin off with your thumb, or you can leave it as and try to forget everything I said about egg membranes as you pop the sweet lobe of fruit into your mouth.
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