Tropical Fruit Fantasies on Your AsianHoliday

The exotic land called Bali has become very popular as a vacation destination. When youdream of an Oriental vacation you may perhaps imagine white sandy beaches, crystal clear warm water, underwater adventure watching dolphins and colourful fish swimming around coral heads.

There is so much more to an Asian vacation, though.

An Oriental  vacation is healthy. You can lounge on the sand , you swim in the warm ocean , and you take in lots of vitamins, minerals and other trace elements when you refresh yourself with a variety of exotic fruit. You can eat them cut up and peeled, or you can endulge yourself with a mixed fruit shake that brims with goodness andwellbeing . And it’s not expensive.

We all probably know tropical fruits such as bananas, oranges, limes and watermelons. There’s also a wide range of delicious fruit that may not be as familiar to you.

Take the custard apple for example. It resembles  a small green hand grenade and is filled with a sweetperfumed white flesh. It’s delicious consumed ripe with coconut  milk or made into ice-cream.

The guava is a greenish-yellow fruit with a pale aromatic flesh. I’ve eaten it as jelly, and it’s also a different experience when it’s hard and not yet ripe , with a spiced salsa of salt, sugar and a few freshly chopped chillies.

The jackfruit is the largest of all cultivated  fruits. The outside is rough and green, and inside sit the pieces of yellow-orange flesh which is succulent and wonderfully  scented. Normally   it’s consumed fresh as an appetiser; and often the green parts are also used in cooking.

The longan is a small fruit with a tough but thin skin. The sweet and succulent flesh is white or pink and has a distinctive musky taste.

Mangoes come in many varieties, and they are unique from those in Hawaii or South America. The Asian mangoes are oblong in shape and have either dark green or yellowy golden skin with whitish or yellow flesh. They are delicious eaten raw, and in Thailand I used to eat mango with sticky rice and coconut milk poured on top. They can also be pickled, made into chutneys or juices, or even used in traditional medicine. You get a completely different culinary experience when you eat slices of green, unripened mango dipped in chillie sugar. While it doesn't taste exactly the same as the apples we get in the west it is still crunchy and delicious.

Sometimes called the queen of the tropical fruits: that’s the mangosteen. To reveal the sweet white fruit simply peel the dark purple skin. It’s usually eaten raw, poured into drinks as juice, or even added to seafood curries, depending on where you are. And apart from its delicious taste, it has a variety of healing properties and is therefore sought-after by alternative medicine, although, as far as I know, it hasn’t been successfully grown yet in temperate climates. So, the mangosteen may be one of the reasons you would want to have an Oriental Vacation.

Pomellos are a taste experience not to be missed. It’s the largest of the citrus fruits, weighs up to two pounds, and is sometimes referred to by the name of “ugly fruit”. Similar to a grapefruit, it is much sweeter, and is delicious by its own as a snack or a desert, used as an ingredient in salads, or squeezed to make a refreshing drink.

There are so many other wonderful tropical fruits, like the well-known pineapple that is so much sweeter here in Asia, or the lesser known rambutan with its sweet white flesh within a bright red hairy skin, or the sapodilla, an oval-shaped fruit with sweet, succculent reddish-brown flesh in a brown skin. Or last but not least, the sweet tamarind whose tough brown pod with sweet dark brown flesh is made into a concentrated pulp and used in cooking, such as Thai curries and soups.

Remember to check out all of these wonderful tastes when you’re on your Asia vacation