To All,
I decided to follow Mark's suggestion and try passion fruit. I don't believe that I had ever had it before.
My first observation is that passion fruit is expensive. A passion fruit is about two inches in diameter, i..e., a little smaller than a tennis ball, and it cost $1.99. With this stratospheric price, at best a passion fruit is suitable only for special occasions.
The first job is to figure out how to eat it. Again, the Internet came to my rescue, and a 90 second video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISBKscT3-90 showed me all I needed to know. You get a knife, cut the passion fruit in half, scoop out the innards, and eat them. I was surprised at how hard it was to cut this wimpy little fruit in half. Though I had a sharp knife, I had to saw away for quite a while before I got through it. Perhaps this toughness protects it from jungle predators. A monkey might have a hard time penetrating the outer shell.
When you look inside your freshly opened fruit, you are disgusted by the goopy mess you see, but as a dedicated fruit explorer, you push on and scrape the slush of seeds and sticky, syrupy juice into a bowl. Because the fruit clings to the inside of the husk, it is surprisingly difficult to scrape it all out, but the experienced fruit eater sticks with it and does not get irritated. The seeds are surprisingly big, and there are a lot of them. The knowing gourmet then takes a spoon and eats the seed-juice mixture. It has a very tart taste, and it suggests some citrus fruit but does not match any well known fruit. The seeds go down easily and are not a problem. Since the husk is nearly a quarter of an inch thick, there is surprisingly little payload, and your $1.99 of passion fruit is gone is a few seconds.
It is easy to see why I never had passion fruit before. It would be hard to integrate this goop into a fruit salad or to arrange it on a plate so that it looked appetizing. This is a fruit to eat by yourself where no one has to watch as you try to manipulate the goop into your mouth.
Verdict: Refreshing but undistinguished, and so expensive as to be little more than a curiosity for the gourmet to sample once so that passion fruit can be checked off of his lifetime list..
