To All,
While sleuthing at Market Basket, I found something called an Ataulfo mango. It is related to the standard mango but is smaller. In looks, it's a cross between a pear and a comma in that it has the size, coloration, and general shape of a pear, but it has a little bend at the small end. See the picture below to see its shape and compare it to a standard mango.
A You Tube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxuD6Zjo5bM stressed that this fruit needs to be fully ripe. It advised that you let it sit on your window sill until it is all wrinkled. ("Let it get really ugly.") This advice spoke to me because of my experience with the unripe standard mango reported on previously. Perhaps over-reacting, I let this sit on my window for seventeen days until it was wrinkled like a 90 year-old face.
Finally, it looked so over-the-hill that I judged it ready to eat. I cut it lengthwise so that I got a nice, flat slab off of one side. There was a slight discoloration inside; perhaps I overdid the ripening thing. As the experts advise, I then scored it. That is, I took a knife to the fruit side and cut a cross-hatch pattern, with a little less than half and inch between cuts. I then turned the slab inside out, and, to my surprise, the fruit popped right up just like it does in the videos made my the experts.
One thing the experts leave out is how to eat the fruit once it is so attractively presented. Not knowing what else to do, I gnawed it like an ear of corn. While perhaps inelegant, this worked fine. To my surprise, there was tartness rather than sweetness. I would call the taste mildly peasant. It was not a taste that stuck in one's mind. After finishing the first slab, I sliced another off the other side and ate it. I was eating it eagerly and not forcing myself. I could not tell that the discoloration affected the taste. I then tried to cut a third slab but couldn't because the pit took most of the remaining fruit. I ended up paring off the remaining peel and eating the remainder like an apple, but in fact there wasn't much more to eat. I was surprised at how little meat there was; I guess I have been spoiled by fruits such as pears that are mostly fruit.
Compared to some of the other fruits I have surveyed, at leasTht the ataulfo mango has a taste. Perhaps after repeated eatings it would become an acquired taste that one would relish. Perhaps.
The verdict: I hesitate to draw strong conclusions since it might have been that this fruit was overripe. Nevertheless, there was not much meat for $1.29, and the taste was middle-of-the-road rather than something to fire one's desire for more.
The experts say that the season is from mid-March until June, so I might give this fruit another try to make sure that I am not misled by a small sample.
Rick
