To All,
While trolling through the aisles of Market Basket, I chanced upon the uniq (PLU #4459), and I was flooded with reminiscences. A year ago this fruit's ugliness caught my eye and compelled me to buy it. This led to the first Fruit Explorer e-mail. This e-mail,which is reproduced below, was written in that primitive age before I took pictures and before I even knew that there were pictures on the Internet. Therefore, I will now revisit the uniq, this time with pictures. The price of the uniq was a flat $1.99. My uniq weighed 18.90 ounces, which is 1.18 pounds. Therefore, its cost was $1.69/pound. This fruit is also called the Ugli. Initially I assumed that this was the original name, bestowed for obvious reasons, and that marketeers saw the blunder and renamed it the uniq. It turns out, however, that Ugli is the trademarked name of a leading producer. Apparently, they have decided to face reality and embrace the fruit's ugliness rather than attempt the impossible task of hiding it. Here are pictures from the Internet.
Despite the hardening that has taken place over the last year as I have encountered a series of off-brand fruits, the uniq still strikes me as surpassingly ugly. Its yellow-green color is stomach-turning, its irregular shape screams deformity, its rough texture suggests the skin of a reptile, and the give when you squeeze it makes it feel cancerous. It is even uglier than the Osage orange (we called them horseapples, see picture below) that was fairly common in Dallas. (I cannot explain the remark in the e-mail below that I find the uniq to be "visually appealing." I guess sometimes the Fruit Explorer nods.) On the plus side, the uniq peeled easily and did not present the preparation problems of the pomelo, from which some think it is descended.
I am not the only one to criticize the look of this fruit. One site, before praising its eating qualities, describes it as, "Hideous to look at - It is lumpy, frumpy, and has a poor complexion." Wikipedia says that the name ugli "...refers to the fruit's unsightly appearance, with rough, wrinkled, greenish-yellow rind."
Here are my pictures, which show:
- The unpeeled fruit.
- The peeled fruit, not separated into segments.
- The peeled fruit, separated into segments.
- The sticker with the PLU code.
An amendment to the description in the original e-mail is that this time the uniq had a slight grapefruit taste. For me, this was yet another drawback since I don't like grapefruit. Because this fruit is so fibrous, it takes a surprisingly long time to chew a segment, which means that the bad taste seems to linger in your mouth forever. (Health sites tout this high level of fiber as a health benefit.)
Another amendment to the original e-mail is that I find that there is controversy about exactly what fruits served as the parents for the uniq. All agree, however, this this hybrid originated in the wild in Jamaica and was stumbled on by humans.
The verdict: When there are so many good fruits, life should not be squandered on such a low-grade fruit, especially one that costs more than the high-quality navel oranges now widely available.
Your party tip is to never, under any circumstances, serve a uniq to your guests. They will think that you are trying to poison them.
Below is the ten-line e-mail that kicked off fruit exploring. (Ten lines, that is, on my computer. It probably has more lines if you're reading this on your phone.) Rereading this e-mail, I find that it has everything except pictures and a party tip. Maybe I should limit all the Fruit Explorer e-mails to ten lines of text.
The Fruit Explorer
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Trying a New Fruit: Uniq [17 Jan 2014]
To All,
While Mike and I were traipsing through Market Basket yesterday, I spotted a fruit that was new to me. It looked like a big, mis-shapen orange with a pebbly green peel. The store placard called it Unique, and the label on the fruit called it Uniq. I decided to go for all the gusto and get one. I ate it at lunch today.
To preserve the sense of adventure, I did not google it before eating. (I did let Mike know when I was about to eat it so that, if anything untoward happened, he could point the investigators in the right direction.) Since it looked like an orange, I peeled it like an orange, except that instead of quartering it I sixthed it because of its size. When peeled, it looked like a big, pale orange. I easily divided it into segments, and with some difficulty popped one of the monster segments into my mouth. In short, it was like an mediocre orange. It had a good bit of fiber, and there was no taste to speak of. There was one big seed in the entire fruit. A typical orange for me is just right for one sitting, but this behemoth was too much; I ate the whole thing but was stuffed.
My verdict: While I find the fruit visually appealing, at its exotic fruit price of $2, its nothing taste does not justify further purchases.
After eating, I googled it and found that it is a cross between a mandarin orange and a grapefruit that was accidentally created in Jamaica in 1914. (Accidental crosses have given us other plants, e.g., the loganberry.) Unfortunately, the cross created not a super fruit but an oversized and insipid orange.
