What's your favorite fruit? I've fallen for pomegranates.

dehydrated cherries and dehydrated blueberries

How many would you say you’ve tried?

For me, I don’t know but I’d guess I’ve really only tried a few dozen fruits over the course of my life. Maybe ~50 or so (that includes different varieties of the same fruit, like multiple kinds of apples, grapes, bananas, etc)

Bing cherries held the title for years and years (and years). Every cherry season I would literally eat myself sick, replenish the toilet paper (sorry!) and do it all over again.

BUT. I’ve recently discovered Sumo mandarins, and they are pure joy in my mouth. Better and bigger than a clementine, and I have literally never had a disappointing one. The problem is that the season is short, and they’re tough to find.

I like a lot of fruits, but grapes may be my favorite, followed by fresh pineapple. If I can find a good cantaloupe that is great too.

I’m into figs for eating fresh and home-dried.

I have acquired about 18 varieties for growing in pots/tubs, stored in the garage over the winter.

This is probably excessive, though not as bad as some lunatics on an online group I’m affiliated with, who spend their winter accumulating dozens of dormant cuttings of new fig varieties (at up to hundreds of dollars a stick :eek::smack:).

A nice ripe Bartlett or Bosc pear.

Berries; especially if I’ve gone picking and gathered them myself.

Meijer’s has year round pomegranate seeds? Already prepared? Holy moly . . .

You all remind me of other delicious fruits I love, like pineapple and cherries. Good Canteloup and honeydew is divine, but there’s too much bad stuff out there; unripe and flavorless. Same for peaches and apricots. If we can get to a farmer’s market and try the stuff and see how it tastes, THEN I’ll buy a bunch of that stuff.

Mangos are nice, but I’m one of those folks who can often taste a ‘fishy’ note to their flesh. We batted that issue around in a lengthy thread here in days gone by.

Not sure where you live, but Trader Joes also has pomegranate seeds already prepared. You can even freeze them!

Blueberries for me lately. Michigan had a great season for perfect Blueberries and I was going through pints all growing season. Unfortunately, as seems to happen regularly, the season ended and we only had crappy shipped in berries. Enough time has now passed that the memory has faded, and the desperation has grown so that the Chilean blueberries seem really good so I am going through decent numbers of those.

Moderator Note

Thread relocated from IMHO to Cafe Society.

Among commonly-encountered fruits, blueberries. However, it is pretty difficult to find good batches, because many batches are sour and unflavorful (the fruit business being about quantity, not quality).

Among rare fruits, granadillas (a type of passionfruit). They are similar in flavor to the passionfruits you occasionally find in the grocery store, but they are so much sweeter and juicier! I’ve NEVER encountered them in the US, but every time I’ve gone to a tropical country (Costa Rica, Peru, and Panama), I’ve been obsessed with them. I also once found them at a market in Amsterdam. My life would be complete if I could find them here.

Very interesting list! I didn’t count up how many I’m missing but it’s quite a few! I would love to try new ones. Except durian, that sounds nasty.

I haven’t had one go bad. They must keep for 4 or 5 days. I can eat one in 2.5

Muscadines–a kind of wild grape native to the southeastern US–hold a special place for me. They have a rich, distinctive flavor, and when I was a kid, I could walk to the edge of our yard and pick as many as I wanted from the vines covering the trees there. (Also, they sometimes ferment inside their thick hulls, and you can watch squirrels get drunk and stagger around from eating them. Got to love a free floor show. :smiley: )

For a more recent contender, there’s jackfruit. I love jackfruit. It’s delicious. However, it is also an absolute pain in the ass to deal with. It turns CelticKnot’s “can’t eat a whole one” issue with pineapples up to 11, but fortunately, you can usually buy just a section of the fruit. The real problem is that it’s sticky. I don’t mean sugar-stickyness; the fibrous parts holding the sweet seed pods inside the fruit ooze copious amounts of latex sap. You have to cover your work surface with paper and your hands and knife with oil…and I still ended up glued to the paper, the fruit, and myself the last time I cut one up.

Cherries. The tarter, the better. 'Nuff said.

For something a little more unusual, American cranberries. Not the things you find in bogs. These are little, nearly translucent red berries that grow on a good-sized bush. They have a tart, but not too tart, taste that I find refreshing.

I’m thinking now that a trip to the nursery is in order. Our back yard is seriously lacking in American cranberry bushes.

Jackfruit is also available in cans at Trader Joes.

Another excellent fruit it the loquat, right off the tree. Some are sweet, but others are sweet-tart–those are my favorites.

True, canned jackfruit is nice in that other people have glued themselves to knives, furniture, and bits of rind so you don’t have to, but it tastes better fresh. :smiley:

Oh, and a bit more nostalgia, prompted by the pomegranates the OP and others mention: as a child, the I never saw pomegranates in stores; the only source of them in my little, rural world was a single tiny tree in my grandmother’s yard. It produced about 4 or 5 fruit per year. Fortunately, only my brother and I liked them–everyone else thought they were more trouble and mess than they were worth–so we shared them between us.

All kinds, especially berries and stone fruits, but on the unusual local end, I quite like waterberries (Syzygium cordatum) and sour figs (Carpobrotus edulis)
Qadgop , have you not come across the “cut around the equator then beat like it owes you money” technique of pomegranate deseeding?

Don’t know if it’s truly year round (though they’re trying because the things are trendy and hey, they are there to sell stuff to ya) but yeah. Personally, I think it’s cheating on a certain level after all these decades of clawing the little ruby nuggets free by hand, but if people are willing to pay for the convenience…

The problem is that people want Fresh Fruit All Year Round Damn This “Seasonal” Nonsense! And the folks buying them for juicing and smoothies don’t seem able to tell the difference between in-season and styrofoam.

Fruit seasons still matter - buy what’s in season and you’ll get better stuff. Remember, the Southern hemisphere’s seasons are six months from the Northern’s, so many fruits now have two seasons in a year, not one, but it’s still true the farther the food travels the less the quality.