Over twenty years ago I ran across an article in The Economist. This was back when it was a serious news magazine; it has now become a sad parody of itself, parrotting whatever the most recent Party-approved far-left talking points happen to be. I even wrote about it once, here.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Way back when I ran across an article in The Economist on that botanical curiosity, the durian. It’s native to Borneo and Sumatra, apparently, although at present the largest exporter is Thailand. What caught my eye in the article was the description of its aroma as having been characterized as “pig shit and turpentine”. Wikipedia has a more complete write-up, so I won’t bore Gentle Reader with all the details. The key detail from the Wikipedia entry may be that of the nine species of the fruit known to be edible, only one is sold on the international market. This may account for the (pardon my getting ahead of myself) discrepancy between the experience as advertised and the experience as lived. In Southeast Asia it seems, many public areas such as transit buses, subways, and hotels go so far as to post signs expressly prohibiting durians on the premises.
Once a month, my father goes to have both eyeballs injected. Bilateral wet-type macular degeneration, or as I call it, macular degeneracy. He tells me it feels almost as good as it sounds, which I find only mildly comforting as it’s highly genetically correlated and both he and his oldest brother have wet-type degeneration, which accounts for only 10% of total cases. While my father is having his injections, I frequently pop down the road a bit and put in a call at my favorite international food market.
This is a very serious international food store. It’s not some place, in other words, where they sell Dos Equis beer, some cheese mass-produced in France, and a jar or two of Italian tomato paste and call it “world market” or some such. Typically I’m one of the six or eight round-eyes in the place. The emphasis is on Asian foods, and most of the major countries are represented. China, of course, but also Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, India, and Laos, to my certain knowledge. They’ve also got strong selections from Mexico (and points south), and this past visit I saw food labels in Cyrillic (bought a jar of Baltic sprats from Russia, from which I infer that the FDA has concluded that, thirty years after the fall of the Warsaw Pact, the Baltic has finally flushed out enough that they’ll permit fish harvested there to be sold here . . . the last time I was there, underway on a German Bundesmarine tender in August, 1985, about all that could live in those filthy waters was jellyfish). They’ve got a great fresh seafood selection, and if Gentle Reader wants to settle a bet on how many dozen different kinds of rice there are, this store would be a good place to go make the count.
In their fresh fruit section they sell whole jack fruits (free advice: unless you really, really are passionately fond of jack fruit, or are close friends with about 72 people who are, a whole jack fruit is going to work out to be several years’ supply of the article). And durians.
Ever since reading about them all those years ago, I’ve wanted to try a durian. But I never worked up the guts to take the plunge and buy one. Until this past Friday.
According to Wikipedia, the durian grows up to about fifteen inches long. It is covered by very sharp, if short, spines. So Lesson No. 1 in today’s catechism will be: You will need to wear leather gloves while opening up your durian.
The eatin’ part of the durian consists of a number of pods of irregular shape and size. I cannot tell that they are arranged symmetrically, either. You can look at the exterior of the fruit and easily discern the boundaries between the larger pods. Note them well; these interstices will be where you slice.
Having donned my gloves, I removed the stem and rested the fruit on its head. Using a fairly sharp chef’s knife (I would not use anything with a narrower blade; you are likely to experience unsafe levels of flexing as you cut into the rind), I then cut along those boundaries between the larger pods. You’ll need to cut anywhere between a half- and a full inch into the rind to get all the way through. To use a perhaps grisly metaphor, you’ll cut ear-to-ear on it, all the way from near the stem on one side to near the stem on the other. Having cut the rind, you can lay your knife aside, and keeping your gloves on you simply pull the sucker open. If you’ve guessed right you’ll end up with two chunks of durian and at least one or two pods exposed. There will be more pods than visible at this initial cut. You will then slice around (not forgetting to put your gloves back on) to locate and extract the additional pods.
Each pod has one seed, which is perhaps the size of a good-sized peach pit. It is dark brown and smooth on the surface, and you will find it growing at the inner edge of its pod. I discovered that the easiest way to remove the seed is to split the pod along its outer longitudinal axis and peel it back from the seed. [According to the Wikipedia entry the seeds are edible if cooked; I did not test that hypothesis.]
The internet has many recipes for using durian. It is used in curries, in desserts of various sorts, and even in ice cream. I refer Gentle Reader to the kindly offices of Google for assistance in locating the recipes. I did not do anything with my bridal durian other than cut the fruit pods into bite-sized pieces and eat them unadorned. I usually like to begin with a new food by eating it as close to how it comes out of the package as I can take it, on the theory that I’ll know better what to do with it if I know how it tastes all on its own.
One removes the pod from the rind by reaching around the pod (having removed the gloves first) and gently pulling it free (it’s attached along its inner longitudinal axis); if you pull too vigorously the pods come apart in your hand very, very easily, as in fact happened to mine. The texture of the pods varies. At the inner edges, the outside surface of the pods is very slightly fibrous, but it is a fiber that teeth have no difficulty cutting through, so that’s not an issue. Moving away from the interior of the fruit, the exterior surface texture of the pod becomes softer and more even. Inside the pod my durian was very extremely creamy in texture, almost to the point of banana pudding (it was also a slightly more pale, but very similar shade, as banana pudding). As mentioned, I took a knife and just sliced the pods up. Not wanting to eat the entire thing at one sitting, I put the left-overs in a bowl, covered it with plastic wrap, and shoved it into the refrigerator. There was no observable change in color, texture, taste, or aroma over the ensuing 48 hours (given that durians are commonly shipped frozen, that wasn’t surprising).
So what about the taste and aroma? We may dispose of the latter first. If you shove your face right into your freshly opened durian, you will notice a scent that is not like anything your are likely to have smelled before. I did not observe it to be either noticeably pleasant (like a freshly peeled tangerine is heaven borne on the breeze) or noticeably unpleasant (on my way to work each morning I drive past a sewer treatment plant that sits way down in a creek valley, and sometimes those boys operating the plant have very obviously cracked open the wrong valve somewhere . . . and my durian smelled nothing like that). But here’s the most important take-away: The aroma was simply not all that pronounced. As mentioned, if you take a face-plant into your durian, you’ll notice the smell. But who, other than a fraternity pledge during Hell Week, makes a point of doing a face-plant into his food? It must be observed that the Wikipedia page linked above points out that not all durians smell the same, either in bouquet or strength. It may be nothing more than that the specific variety shipped internationally just doesn’t smell as bad as the varieties consumed locally. If so, then so be it; I’ll take the trade-off.
The flavor is sweet, but not overpoweringly so. There is no tartness to it, either. The flavor of my durian was also not overwhelming. Stronger than a strawberry; not as powerful as a tangerine or peach. And very different; again, there’s nothing in my experience that it reminded me of to any degree. I can see why it would make the beginnings of a good dessert or flavoring in ice cream. It would doubtless combine with other essences (e.g. coconut) to produce distinctive flavors, but without any over-bearing the other.
The bottom-of-the-page conclusion is this: I will definitely be buying more durians over the years. Having satisfied myself that the unadulterated fruit is thoroughly satisfactory, I will begin the experimentation.