Mangosteens

I discovered this wonderful fruit when Kweepo and I were travelling in Yunnan in 2007. We were walking in the mountain and noticed a fruit seller with a huge bounty of exotic fruits the likes of which I'd never seen before. I couldn't resist and we bought a few different fruits. All were amazing, but particularly so this strange little black fruit with a white interior, which I later discovered to be a mangosteen.

I never thought I'd find these things outside of China, so I was delighted when I found a place selling mangosteens on Granville Island a year or so ago. I ravenously bought a bunch and took them home, only to discover that the inside was all rotten. The skin of all the mangosteens at that place were a lot harder than I remembered them being on the fruit I ate in Yunnan, indicating clearly that they are overripe.

I've since noticed lots of other Asian markets selling the fruits, but they all uniformly seem to be overripe. I bought some the other day at a mini-mart called "Joyce 33" on Kingsway that seemed to have fresher fruit, hoping that I would have better luck, but as before, this is what the inside looked like:

YUCK! Look at that yellow pus. Disgusting. Refer to the Wiki entry to see what a ripe mangosteen should look like.

Is it just my bad luck? Am I picking these wrong? People at the same store were buying these things by the dozen, and they seemed to know what they were looking for, so I suspect I might just not be picking them right. I'm eager to re-live that Yunnan experience. Mangosteens are AMAZING when they're just the right ripeness.

When ripe, the skin is a little firm but gives way with a little pressure. When overripe, as here, the skin is bark-like and impossible to open by hand. I had to use a hammer(!) to open this one. Breaking open the inch-thick hard skin reveals a globe of soft, delicate, pure white inside. The skin should be purple, not brown as here, and the pulp pure silky white.

The pulp consists of five or six carpels in the manner of the sections of oranges. One of these contains a large seed, while the others are pure flesh. It's a great fruit because the flesh is so soft and juicy that you barely need to chew, and it's very sweet without being either too fibrous in the manner of an orange, nor too sour, nor too pasty.

According to the Wiki entry, Mangosteens were still somewhat of a rare find elsewhere like in the U.S. up until 2007 due to restrictions on exports due to the possibility of the fruit harboring the Asian fruit fly, but since then mangosteens grown in Puerto Rico have begun to appear. I don't remember seeing them in Vancouver before we visited Yunnan in May of 2007, which seems to jibe with this information. That, or I just wasn't looking. Everywhere in the world until a few years ago these were still quite a rare find. Kweepo says that these were even unavailable in Beijing, where she grew up.

The mini-mart where I found my mangosteens the other day was selling them for an incredible $0.99/lb. They go for up to $4.99 elsewhere. Apparently fresh mangosteens have been found going for up to $45/lb in places like New York.

I'm sure there must be some places selling good mangosteens somewhere, considering how ubiquitous they've become in the last few years.