My husband, a friend of ours and myself went the other day to a Chinese supermarket and bought a durian.
Open parenthesis (for those who don’t know it): A durian is, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “1: a large oval tasty but foul-smelling fruit with a prickly rind and 2: an East Indian tree (Durio zibethinus) of the silk-cotton family that bears durians”. End parenthesis. Now back to our story. As you can see, the fruit is extremely tasty, but boy oh boy, it STINKS! A combination of dead rat, cheese gone awfully bad and vomitting berk. And above all, it’s just as prickly as a cactus. So, we were wondering: WHO could have ever figured out that that thing was even edible? Because it was so prickly sharp, that person must have REALLY wanted to taste it, otherwise he wouldn’t have taken all that trouble to peel that deadly rind off the fruit at all!
So, what do you think? Was that person at the last stage of starvation or was it a very stupid bet he made with his drinking mates?
They are extremely popular here at this time of the year, though the aroma is such that the fruit are usually banned from hotels, aircraft, etc. I don’t mind it - kind of greasy (a bit like avocado), and with… that taste. An early colonial governor here once described the smell as a mixture of “carrion and custard”.
I guess the first person to try one agreed with today’s fans of the stuff, and found the aroma delicious (like most fruit, I guess, it’s designed to be eaten by something and have its seeds distributed). But a lot of people from Northern China who come to HK, try them and dump them - usually behind furniture in hotel lobbies and similar places.
The outer shell is prickly, but when a ripe durian falls from the tree the shell cracks open so animals can eat the fruit inside. Humans are animals too
Hehehe… No wonder those too-ripe durians never end up in a respectable supermarket for me to see (since I don’t shop at non-respectable supermarket) grin
One has to be a sort of genius to figure out that so simple explanation of yours. Thanx:D
Humans aren’t the only species to eat them; they are (apparently) much sought by apes in the wild; I would imagine that this behaviour was observed and copied by humans (if we haven’t simply been eating them ever since there was no distinction between pre-apes and pre-humans.
As far as I can tell, the Cantonese take the “edible until proven otherwise” approach to ANYTHING. Take a trip through a market in Canton and you’ll see cats, rats, dogs, bugs . . . durians seem pretty tame in comparison.
I believe it’s the rind that smells very offensive (to most humans); the pulp inside is very odd, but not nearly as strong-smelling, I think (I’ve never had the opportunity of trying one).
I have tasted it and it tastes like rotting meat mixed with vomit. I gag at the mere thought of it. The consistency is creamy. I guess different fruits were made to suit different tastes but it’s not my taste.
I thought it was rather the pulp. See, we removed the rind and threw it into the garbage bin (yup, we’re neeaaaatttt people). And guess what, it didn’t stink of durian, as we had expected. But the pulp. Boy! We put it in a plastic container (sort Tupperware) and the container in the fridge. And whenever we opened the fridge, the stench practically invaded the whole flat! And believe me, it didn’t come from the rind in the garbage bin!
It really tastes best fresh, all fruits suffer from prolonged transit times. I enjoyed it the few times I had it in Thailand, but I won’t go too far out of my way to get it here.
Ha, and you call yourself Mangetout. Eats everything, indeed!
The thing about durian is that it does smell bad but it has a pleasant after taste. Sort of the opposite of something that tastes a bit good with an unpleasant aftertaste. My guess as why anyone tried it was that they were hungry and something else was eating it so they thought to themselves, “Hey, that bird is eating it, must not be poisonous.” Or maybe the first person who ate it had a really bad head cold.
As I have done in another thread today, I am standing up for the taste of the humble durian. I don’t know what state the one that sailor ate was, but I have eaten them several times in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, and they’re not bad at all. To repeat myself: eating a durian is like “eating strawberries in a public toilet”.
I LOVE durian drinks. They taste and smell like tropical fruit - kind of like guava. Sometimes the smell is stronger than other times, but once you take a sip you don’t notice the smell anymore anyway. And it just tastes like a smooth, cool, creamy, tropical milkshake. Maybe you guys who thinks they are so awful have unfortunately gotten a bad one?
I’ve eaten both fresh durian in Asia (they look really weird hanging from trees), and frozen ones here in Canada. I honestly have no idea what some people here are talking about when they say they taste/smell like rotten meat and vomit… they are quite sweet and creamy - with a very strong but fruity taste. I won’t eat a whole durian due to how rich they are; that would be sorta like eating 2 pounds of cake batter all at once - you just get sick of it. Actually that’s a good description - it’s like eating really thick fruit-flavored cake batter or cookie dough.
But as with other things it tends to be an aquired taste for most, delicious to some, and bad to the rest. Saying durian tastes/smells gross is just like saying liquor or beer is disgusting (these actually take an order of magnitude more effort to get used to than durian)… and how many of y’all would agree with that and never touch the stuff? Lastly if you’re used to eating oatmeal and pot roast and have never tried anything wilder than an apple, you’ll be rather stunned when you try a fruit with some real taste :D.
there are many different types of durian. some are more fragrant than others. Ripe ones taste fine. I’ve never had one that was ripe that tasted nasty. Pungent smell though. Then you can say that about french cheese. In some ways, durian is a bit like non pasteurized cheese you get in France – pungent smell, similar texture…
