Grew up in New Zealand and our neighbours had a passionfruit vine grown along their garden wall. We used to stuff our faces with it.
It grows like a week where I live (Sydney, Australia). It wouldn’t occur to me to pay money for passionfruit, since the vines are so prolific and easy to grow.
They’re relatively common in Toronto neighbourhoods with a large Chinese minority (of which there are plenty), but they’re seasonal. I’ve rarely seen passionfruit on sale in Toronto.
I picked it off the vine and ate it in Napier, New Zealand.
We get both yellow and purple varieties, they are called “grenadilla” here, especially when fresh fruit or pulp (which you can buy in cans, it’s a popular cake topping). The juice gets called passionfruit more and more, nowadays.
“I live in the US and I have tasted fresh passionfruit, straight from the fruit”
It tastes like fucking awesome! I think I’ve seen it in the US exactly two times.:mad: Almost all of my passionfruit experiences have been in foreign places (mostly Costa Rica, Panama, and Peru but also in Amsterdam). I’m really obsessed with the related Passiflora ligularis species (it is named granadilla rather than maracuya in Spanish). It’s so delightful, but it seems to be available only after a minimum 6-hour airplane ride from here.
I’m generally unacquainted with passion or fruit, and I admit the possibility that these are related somehow. [eats another Hot Pocket]
It’s weird–we used to be able to get them in Colorado all the time. Then a few years back, they disappeared. They reappeared this year.
We done passionfruit!: Monty Python - Self-Defense Against Fruit - YouTube
I have seldom if ever seen them here in Silicon Valley, though I’d probably find them in Vietnamese or Thai grocery stores if I looked.
But I did find a lot in Hawaii, where they’re called “lilikoi”. I bought the yellow ones fresh, strained the pulp from the seeds, and mixed it with oil, vinegar, sugar and salt and made a brilliant salad dressing from it. I drizzled it over shredded cabbage and green onions and made a tropical slaw.
Yum. If I had to describe the flavor, I’d say it was a cross between ripe peach and ruby grapefruit, with a little guava thrown in. I wish I could find it around here.
There are about 400 species in the genus Passiflora, but only a few varieties are widely exploited commercially.
“In most countries passion fruit production is based on caltivars of the golden passion fruit (p.edulis f. flavicarpa). The major exceptions are South Africa, Kenya and New New Zealand where production is dependent on lines of the purple passion fruit (P.edulis) and in Australia where hybrids between the two forms are exploited.”
Where they’re adapted, the vines of some types are invasive (in Texas I had one whose shoots ran under sidewalks to emerge in unexpected places).
I dont like the gelatinous–looking-glop look it has but the taste is so delicious! I love it more when the skin is smooth and plump.
We had a large vine at my parents place (Canberra) when I was growing up. Collecting passionfruit each day was one of our jobs. We had enough some years that we would fill ice-cube trays with the pulp and seeds and have passionfruit ice blocks.
Not kidding about them being like weeds, I planted one at my place about 10 years ago. Never gave me any fruit and has been impossible to kill off completely. The damn thing is like bamboo! Each year in summer there will be a vine pop up out of the ground somewhere in that patch of the garden and climb the fence.
No, but I did find Dragon Fruit/Pitaya in my grocery store once and tried it. I didn’t really like it that much, but that’s probably the most “uncommon” fruit I’ve tried.