My co-worker brought to work a basket of various odd and interesting fruit that she picked up at a nearby Asian market. There’s one particularly tasty one that she doesn’t remember what it was called.
They come on a branch, in bunches, kind of like grapes.
They’re about the size of cherries.
They’re covered in a brownish-yellowish dry skin, which you peel off.
The fruit itself is clear. It has the texture of a peeled grape.
They have a reddish-black pit in the center of each fruit.
The brownish-yellow skin points to a longan. Generally, lychees have a spikier texture while longans are smooth. Lychees are also a little larger generally. Both fruits are clear and very sweet.
Very likely a longan, from the color you describe.
To hijack this thread: there’s a fruit that I am totally unable to identify. I’ve not ever found it in a grocery store; it’s always growing along a sidewalk, and I pluck one off and eat it.
Superficially it looks like a lychee, but is not one. On the outside it’s red. The texture of the skin is pretty rough; the skin is also edible and not very tough. Inside the flesh is yellow, with no pit or anything, and sort of bland and grainy.
Lychees are generally larger than cherries - about the size of large limes, or perhaps biggish unshelled walnuts. If they’re the size of average cherries, they’re probably longans. Also, lychees are quite distinctly redder than longans. Brown skin would probably indicate longans.
That could be it then. On the Wiki page for the Lychee fruit, in the first picture they look redder than the fruits my co-worker brought in, but a later picture (the one captioned “lychee showing a peeled fruit”) shows yellowish ones. Looking at the wiki page for longans, though, they definitely look more like what we were eating yesterday.
Sounds to me like a Butia Palm berry (also known as Jelly Palm or Pindo Palm). They make these little yellow berries that are very sweet and tasty. My dogs eat them off the ground in my backyard. (Scroll to the bottom of the page linked above to see the berries.
I’m not saying your chances of hurting yourself are necessarily high, but the idea of “if things look edible, they’re meant to be eaten” isn’t exactly bulletproof logic, and I wouldn’t want others to not know the possible risks. I’d exercise the same caution as with mushrooms. If I don’t know exactly what it is, I’m not going to eat it.
