Sri Lankan Fruits
This will be a juicy article! What a variation of the best, sweetest and the most luxurious pieces of fruit you can find here - that's Sri Lankan Fruits! The local atemoya, wooden apples, soursop, rambutan, papaya, mango, coconut, jackfruit and much more - they all taste like heaven and I would like to introduce you some of the best fruit I have ever eat.
We always like to try new and exotic fruit when we travel with Elie. When you visit some tropical country and try to eat their local seasonal fruit it's almost impossible to be disappointed. They have a great conditions to grow something what we can hardly experience in Europe or North America. Just the ordinary bananas taste so much better than in Europe, they are so rich in flavor and sweet!
Sri Lankan Fruits
On Sri Lanka, you can find small fruit shops on every corner. However, there's not as much of them like in Thailand. You can almost always have the better price if you bargain with the seller. Anyway, the price of the local fruit and vegetables is still very low which is great for us. We use a car on Sri Lanka and we always buy a lot of coconuts to drink and many kind of fruits to eat so we are never hungry :-) Let's see what we have tried so far:
Bananas
Everyone knows bananas but only those who visit tropical countries know the real taste of them. An article about Sri Lankan fruits has to start with the most common one. Bananas are just everywhere on Sri Lanka. Banana trees grow alongside the roads, trains and its as common as grass for Europeans. However, their taste is so much better than in Europe - they are like pineapple cake mixed with super rich banana flavor and honey. Just special! There are many varieties and I am no expert in knowing their exact botanical names but look at these pictures and I bet you will want to try one:
Wooden Apple
This is elephant's fruit as we found out. Elephants eat the fruit as a whole but we did only eat it inside because of the very hard shell which looks like a wood. When you break the shell, you will find a brown substance with pips (which you can eat). The taste is like sweet and sour and when we first tried this fruit, we were like "do we like it or not?" and we really didn't know. The taste was very unusual for us but the more we eat the wooden apple, the more we liked it. And now, we love it!
Soursop
Another brilliant one! We did get this beautiful fruit from our host in Kosgoda on a breakfast plate. Our breakfasts on Sri Lanka were usually full of fruit by the way, which is great for starting the day. Soursop must be some relative of durian, our most favorite fruit. The fruit is quite big and it has little thorns on it. It's soft when it's ready to eat. Inside, you can find white, sweet and creamy flesh with pips. However, it has also a fibre in it and when you finish your sweet dish, you may feel like after using a dental floss. In fact, my teeth did feel great and clean after eating this fruit. Soursop is one of our most favorite Sri Lankan fruits now and we always eat it like mad :-)
Rambutan
Asian classic which is always good. You can't mistake this fruit because of it's red hairy skin. It's very sweet and juicy inside with one big pip inside the flesh. We always have few of these in our bag or in a car for a quick snack. It's ideal fruit for such a purpose because it doesn't melt like bananas or "ready to eat" sweet apple (atemoya).
Papaya
For me, Sri Lankan papaya is the second best I have tried so far and I absolutely love it. If you ask which one is the best for me - the one from Maldives. On other places like Thailand or Costa Rica, I wasn't much fun of this fruit but on Sri Lanka it's different for me (Elie still doesn't like papaya much). It's rich in flavor and very juicy. It melts on your tongue alone. You can just put a piece of papaya to your mouth, press a little and that's it - your mouth should be full of sweet juice. Beautiful fruit indeed!
Mango
Right now, we have finished our mango and it was so good again! It's like a big bowl of the sweetest nectar. There are two types of mango on Sri Lanka - one of them is big, yellow and very sweet. We buy this one. The other is very small and supposedly sour. We didn't try this one yet but sour taste is something we don't need much so we are loyal to our yellow king. Sri Lankan mango has almost no fibre and it is the reason why it melts in your mouth easily. It's very similar to Thailand yellow mango in terms of fibre. It's very, very sweet and it smells little bit spicy. Yes, we can feel something like spice garden in this fruit. I don't know the reason but Sri Lanka is famous for it's various spices and the sweet yellow mango has definitely some of them inside, too.
Coconut
Coconut is our water in Sri Lanka, literally. We drink dozens of coconuts and we can't imagine to live without this unique gift of Nature in tropical country. It has almost the same composition as human blood plasma and doctors used coconut water during the second world war when there was a shortage of real human plasma. You can basically pump it into your vein. Yes, it's really very close to our bodies and we can feel it every day. We always have few coconuts in our car and when we feel tired or thirsty, coconut water gives us immediate energy. It also cleans your body and it's the best sports drink possible with lot of electrolytes. We always feel full of energy after drinking coconuts.
Pineapple
As usual, pineapple in a tropical country is something very different from a pineapple in Europe or North America. It doesn't have to travel thousands of miles and so it is much more ripe. People just sell it when it's ready to eat. The smell, the taste, and also the look is just awesome in Sri Lanka.
Sweet Apple - Atemoya
This is a real delicacy. I love this fruit so much! It reminds me some pudding because the consistency is very creamy, unfortunately there are pips inside so we couldn't eat this fruit as fast as we wanted to :-) They sold us hard atemoyas on the market so they were to eat on the next day usually. You can always ask the seller when is the best time to eat the fruit, eg. if it is "ready to eat today" or "eat tomorrow".
Passion Fruit
Elie loves passion fruit. Every time she can buy it, she does so. This is also a good snack when travelling because it has a very compact packaging. It's just a small ball with a surprise inside. There are many varieties of passion fruit, some of them are sweet, some of them are little sour. They also have different colours. When we eat this fruit, we just cut it in half and then drink it! You can use a spoon as well.
There are many, many more types of fruit on Sri Lanka. I covered just a few examples but I hope you get the idea how good it is :-) If you have never been to a tropical country, I wish you to go and taste these! I have a little advice - always look for a ripe fruit. You may buy a fruit that is not ready to eat yet and you may be disappointed. However, this doesn't mean the fruit is not tasty. This happened with durian to us. When we first tried durian, we bought a piece which was not ready to eat and we were disappointed. The second try was a little bit better. But after a few more attempts, we found durian as our most favourite fruit ever and now we know exactly how to recognise a good piece.
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Tom