DURAN, DUR-I-AN

This morning I woke up early to meet with an NYU student about doing graphics for her spec commercial (the client is Tabasco).  Since I was in Manhattan and the weather was so nice and spring-like, I decided to wander down to Chinatown afterwards and treat myself to a bubbletea.  While I was at my favorite tea shop, I noticed the weird pokey fruit hanging at the produce market next door and decided today was the day I was going to actually try one.  I was in the mood to spice things up (maybe because that's Tabasco's slogan) and although I didn't know what I was getting myself into - I figured I was up for the adventure.

Durians are tropical fruit from Asia that are covered with dangerously pokey spines and which fall from the trees when ripe (look out belowww!).  The most important thing to note is that they STINK.  They smell so bad, in fact, that they're banned from many stores and some shipping companies refuse to carry them.  After watching a brief tutorial to figure out how in the world you're supposed to open the thing, my co-adventurer James and I took it to the roof for stink reasons and busted the porcupine fruit open.


























It definitely had a unique odor to it -- some people think durians smell like dirty socks, or propane -- I think ours smelled like fish garbage.  But once we got it open we pulled out the first pod and hoped that the taste would be better than the smell.  There are usually four or five pods to a fruit, and each one contains a brown seed the size of a date surrounded by gooey, fatty fruit.  Durians are more like avocados than other fruit in that way -- high fat content, big pit, strange ripening patterns.  They are great for your hair and nails, supposedly, but obviously quite bad for your nose.

The pod was a bit intimidating in its gloppy yellow pungeant-ness, but we gave the taste-testing an A+ deserving level of effort and here's the consensus:

-Durian fruit tastes more savory than sweet
-Because of the high sulfur content you smell it more than you taste it (I think)
-The texture and flavor was like an oniony egg-custard
-We weren't able to finish a full pod, let alone four -- but I'm glad we gave this new experience a real go.  What good is living in a place with strange things to offer if you're never willing to try them?

Three cheers for Durian!  I would definitely not recommend it straight up but I'd be willing to consider trying it covered with chocolate in a smoothie.  Then again, that goes for most things.