To All,
The latest offering from Whole Foods is the feijoa (pronounced fay-HOE-a). At first, the price of $7.99 per pound made me wince, but when I saw how small the feijoas were, I realized that a very small investment would allow me to play in the feijoa game. My feijoa weighed 0.09 pound and cost $0.72.
The feijoa is green and round or egg-shaped. It is in the guava family but not the guava genus. (It is also called the pineapple guava and the guavasteen, but these misleading names should be suppressed. The botanical convention is that you can call a plant by the name of the main member of a genus only if the plant is in that genus.) It is native to South America. Feijoas have become popular among growers in New Zealand, where there are more than thirty cultivars, four of which are pictured below so you can see the differences. Most of our feijoas come from New Zealand. They were widely grown in California a hundred years ago but apparently were largely supplanted by the avocado. Note the distinctive whorl of irregularly-shaped spots that is visible when the fruit is cut in two; this makes it easy to identify a sliced feijoa.
I went to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV6H8kjXe8s to learn about feijoas and was gratified to find that "...unlike guavas, the seeds are not hard and annoying."
To eat a feijoa, cut it in half through its equator. Look at the spots around the center of the cut-open fruit to judge ripeness: translucent indicates ripe; white indicates underripe; brown indicates overripe. Here is a picture of a ripe feijoa and an unripe one. It is annoying that apparently there is no reliable way of telling if a feijoa is ripe by looking at or feeling the outside.
When I cut my feijoa open, I found that it was brownish inside. It was not as brown as the picture above, so it was only slightly overripe. I then scooped the meat out with a spoon and ate it. If you do not have a spoon handy or wish to eat your feijoa is a more natural way, Wikipedia gives you some tips.
I found the taste to be mildly pleasant. Also, there was an exotic undertaste that was tantalizing but hard to focus on. Internet experts rave about the feijoa's complex mix of different fruit tastes. The site http://feijoafeijoa.wordpress.com/tag/fragrance/ was content to say that the feijoa's flavor defies description. I only got the faintest hint of this complex flavor, perhaps because my feijoa was overripe. (I noticed that the meat was harder to scoop out of my feijoa that in those on the Internet, indicating that mine was imperfect.) The skin can be eaten. It is said to be bitter but that you soon get used to it and perhaps relish it. I did not try the skin. The feijoa is so small that each half only gives you a couple of medium-sized bites. This fruit will not fill you up.... the feijoa may be torn or bitten in half, and the contents squeezed out and consumed. An alternative method is to bite the end off and then tear the fruit in half length ways, exposing a larger surface with less curvature and using one's teeth to scrape the pulp out closer to the skin. This method results in less waste of the fruit. Peeling a small fruit and eating whole is a particularly sensual way of eating a feijoa and is called a "feijoa bomb".
The verdict: Feijoa has a pleasing taste, but I don't think that at the moment I can pronounce on it since my feijoa was overripe. Because of its expense per pound, you will not want to eat a pile of feijoas at one sitting, but eating one can make a grace note at the end of a meal.
Why is this fruit not more common and cheaper? The explanation seems to be a combination of the fruit being easily bruised and the fact that it remains at optimum ripeness for a very short time, perhaps a couple of days. These properties seem to doom the feijoa to never being more than a minor niche fruit, at least around here. Where it grows, it probably is good and cheap but for a short season. (Wikipedia does, however, claim that the fruit can be frozen for up to a year with no loss in quality. This would seem to indicate that the juice, which is said to be delicious, could be a common product. Maybe the fruit is just too small to fool with.)
The feijoa plant is a sprawling, evergreen shrub and is said to make a good hedge. The flowers are spectacular, and you will note the resemblance to guava flowers. The petals of a feijoa flower are edible with, it is said, a slight taste of cinnamon, and birds eat them. They are good in salads. Unfortunately, feijoa petals are a delicacy not sold even at Whole Foods. The pictures below give you a sense of the the shrub and flowers.
This obscure fruit has given birth to an astonishing array of commercial and homemade products. Here are pictures of the usual mix of alcoholic beverages, jams, candies, regularity inducers, fruit drinks, and other products. (I could find no image of the rumored feijoa perfume. A site that specializes in fragrances, http://glasspetalsmoke.blogspot.com/2009/01/strange-fruit-flavor-and-fragrance-of.html, says, "Feijoas have an ambrosial flavor and taste exactly like they smell." Perfumes are usually a complicated mix of a number of smells, and I imagine that feijoa could be some perfume's secret ingredient. This site also says that the feijoa's flavor defies categorization.)
Artists have not yet discovered the feijoa, and only a few struggling steps have been taken along the path to feijoa artistry.
Here's your party tip. Decide which fruit each guest most resembles in looks or personality and then for the rest of your party require that your guests call each other by their fruit names. Someone with spiky hair might be Pineapple. Someone with a long nose might be Banana. Someone with a round, red face might be Apple. Someone with warts might be Horned Melon. Someone whose head is covered with scraggly hair and a scraggly beard might be Coconut. Someone with a sharp tongue might be Kumquat. Someone who is hard to deal with but worthwhile when you do might be Jack Fruit. Someone who is sour might be Quince. Someone who is pretty on the outside but bland inside might be Dragon Fruit. To help people keep track of each other's fruit names, provide each guest with a lapel pin that pictures his or her eponymous fruit. Long after your party, guests will meet on the street by chance, glimpse each other's lapel pins, and call each other by their fruit names. In this way your party will forge a bond that will last through the years. (It is your choice whether to reveal the reasons behind the fruit assignments.)
