The Fruit Explorer Encounters Three Red Fruits, Part 2 of 2

[Continued from Part 1]

To my astonishment, blood orange is heavily represented in beauty products. Pictured first are a series of lip products, which seems to be the special province of the blood orange; I guess this makes sense if you want red lips. I do not, however, know what lip butter, lip essentials, or lip scrub are; it is only with a lipstick that I am on known ground. In the body butters and body scrubs that follow note that the blood orange teams up with apricot to give your skin a double dose of good health. I end with a potpourri of soaps and perfumes, where the concept of a solid perfume is new to me. Maybe this is a fancy term for deodorant.

   

   

   

            

      

   

   

      

         

It is among the home-made products, however, where the blood orange really struts its stuff. Pictured are a few of the available blood orange creations:

• Blood orange upside-down cake
• Blood orange cheesecake
• Blood orange pies (six different types of pie)
• Blood orange meringue pielets
• Blood orange tart
• Blood orange donut
• Blood orange waffles
• Candied blood orange  (two pictures)
• Blood orange dark chocolate mousse
• Blood orange cupcakes
• Blood orange marmalade
• Spiced duck and blood orange salad
• Blood orange green tea

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

      

      

   

If Oprah's vodka is not to your taste and you would prefer to cultivate your Martha Stewart side, you can try her recipe for making blood orange gelato. (This recipe uses not blood orange but blood orange zest. I learned that citrus zest is citrus peel, either grated or in strips; here's avideo that shows how to harvest the zest. I was surprised to see a special kitchen tool at Whole Foods for producing citrus zest; see below.) If you are not satisfied with gelato and want to brew some blood orange beer, here is the recipe. I wrote this paragraph while listening to music by a band named Blood Orange. Ideally, I would also have been wearing a necklace made of blood orange Czech glass gemstone beads.

   

According to Wikipedia, the cara cara orange was first discovered in 1976 on a tree on the Cara Cara Hacienda in Valencia, Venezuela. (This fact is so widely known that it even appeared in the Trader Joe's flyer for February 2015.) Some think that it is a hybrid of two varieties of navel orange, and some think that it was a mutation. At any rate, this is a new entrant in the pantheon of oranges that has only recently become available in this country. The cara cara's redness is due to lycopene, which is also responsible for the redness in tomatoes but not in the blood orange, for which the red is due to anthocyanins.. Lycopene is a useful, natural food coloring and is approved for use in the U.S. 

(Several decades ago Mike once showed up in a state of high excitement and announced, "The red m&ms are back!" This was of great interest to me since, until two years ago when I achieved nutritional enlightenment, I considered m&ms to be the perfect food. The red m&ms had been pulled in 1976 because they were colored with what was realized to be a toxic food coloring, and they did not reappear until 1987. The toxic food coloring that is no longer used is called FD&C red no. 2, and is popularly called Amaranth. (You will recall the plant amaranth being referred to in the jack fruit e-mail of 4 Aug 2014). The FDA currently approves only seven artificial food colors for general use; one of them is red, namely FD&C red no. 40. There are two additional artificial dyes that are allowed for limited use--citrus red 2 is allowed only for coloring orange peels, and orange B is allowed only for coloring hot dog and sausage casings.  (Since oranges are dyed to make them more appealing, the coloring cannot be used to distinguish different types.) So what currently colors the red m&Ms? WBUR reports that in the U.S. the artificial color FD&C no. 40 is used, while in Europe natural colors are used; apparently the red m&Ms in Europe are colored not by lycopene but by a cabbage extract. Using artificial colors in the U.S. is an issue since it is claimed that artificial dyes cause hyperactivity in children. Otherwise uncredited statements in this paragraph are taken from the article on food coloring in Wikipedia. There is more material here, but since I am not the food coloring explorer, I will get back to the topic.)

The cara cara is so new that it has not had time to penetrate our culture. As far as the big three of fruit products--alcoholic beverages, beauty products, and jams--I have not been able to find a single commercial cara cara product. The human spirit, however, is not to be denied, and the first signs of grassroots activity is beginning to stir with the appearance of homemade cara cara wine drinks.

   

If you are still wondering what the sour orange (17 Jul 2014) is good for, experimenters have found that it provides an excellent rootstock on which to graft a cara cara scion. (See the e-mail of 1 Feb 2015 for an explanation of grafting terminology.)

Red Pear

When you go to a new store, you find new fruits. This analogous to going to a new habitat and finding new flowers. On my first trip to Wegman's I found a red pear (PLU #4415). My red pear weighed 0.68 of a pound, so at $1.69/pound, it cost $1.15. It was bigger than almost all apples and pears. Its texture was crunchy like an apple rather than soft like a pear. It had no apple flavor and no pear flavor.

The verdict: This fruit has no detectable flavor, is expensive, and is a little too big to eat comfortably at one sitting, so it has little to recommend it except its cheery look. In being all visual flash and bang while lacking in taste, it follows in the steps of the dragon fruit and the apricot. In short, the red pear is but a minor variation on mainstream fruit; moreover, it is a variation that subtracts rather than adds value.

Party Tip

Bring out the inner artist in your guests by giving them an opportunity to create a still life. After giving them a short lecture on the principles of composition, provide a heap of fruits of different sizes, colors, and textures, and give each guest a bowl. Watch as they analyze the problem and decide how to select and arrange the fruit. Do they appreciate the power of red?  How do they handle the long, yellow, smooth banana versus the ellipsoidal, yellow, warty, horned melon? How do they make effective use of the smaller but showier fruits such as the rambutan, kumquat, and apricot? Do they use the whole pomegranate, or only the seeds? Does a guest prefer the cornucopia effect or the "less is more" principle? Do they express themselves with common or exotic fruits? What does each still life say about the personality of its creator? Take perhaps half a dozen pictures of each still life so that you fully capture its charms, and put all the pictures on your party website. Your guests will then be able to direct their friends to the site so that all can appreciate their creations. Perhaps one of your guests will turn out to have extraordinary talent in this area and can be called upon to create centerpieces for all Thanksgiving dinners.

Rick

P.S. In the e-mail of 9 Dec 2014, I unveiled a new work of art, "Sticker Shock." Another new art work, "Sticker Shock II" is now ready. Since this piece is derivative, it is only worth a P.S. rather than an entire e-mail. For comparison, both "Sticker Shock" and "Sticker Shock II" appear below. It is easy to tell them apart since the original "Sticker Shock" features the pomelo sticker, which inspired my collecting of stickers; the pomelo sticker is the big one in the upper left corner than looks like the star that guided the three wise men. (All of the pictures in these e-mails are low-res, e.g., about 100KB, plus or minus. If you would like a high-res copy of any of my pictures, they are available, except for the pictures of the quince, which I blundered away. High-res is 4MB, plus or minus. All of the pictures from the Internet are low-res.)

   

The Fruit Explorer Encounters an Apricot, Part 1 of 2

I had never had a raw apricot (PLU #3302), so I snapped one up when they appeared at Whole Foods. My only previous exposure to apricot had been the bonbons in a box of Russel Stover chocolates. The first thing one notices about apricots is that they are like little jewels, with a dull orangeish-yellow glow like the setting sun. It's nice to hold this little fruit, roll it around in your hand, and look at it. The apricot is in the still-life hall of fame. Mine weighed 0.14 pound, so at $3.99/pound it cost 56 cents.

   

         

After washing your apricot, you can bite it like an apple, though the connoisseurs tend to break it or perhaps cut it in half along a seam. Apricot is a stone fruit like cherry, peach, or plum, so there is a stone in the center. Inside the stone (or pit) is the celebrated seed. (More on the seed later.) The seam in my apricot was not pronounced, so I had to cut mine in half with a knife. I ate everything except the stem and the stone. There was a taste, but it was so mild that it's hard to say anything about it. Some complain about the peel, but I found nothing distasteful or off-putting about it. The pit looks like a fat, unshelled almond. Here are my pictures.

• The whole apricot.
• The apricot cut in two.
• The pit, freshly harvested and still wet with apricot juice.
• The dried pit on the left, and for comparison an unshelled almond on the right.

         

The verdict: This small, firm fruit is pleasing to the touch and soothing to look at. The taste is inoffensive. In sum, the pleasure provided by this fruit is visual and tactile rather than gustatory.I am happy to say that you can get this pleasure in the store without buying the fruit. Since it is fairly cheap, however, you might want to bring one home so you can admire it, like Yorick's skull, while relaxing in your recliner.

An apricot tree is not usually grown from seed. Rather, as Wikipedia puts it: 

Apricot cultivars are most often grafted onto plum or peach rootstocks. The scion from an existing apricot plant provides the fruit characteristics, such as flavour and size, but the rootstock provides the growth characteristics of the plant.

(Grafting terminology: The rootstock is the part of the plant with roots that grows from the ground. The rootstock, e.g., the plum  is chosen because it grows well in the chosen habitat. The scion is the shoot from the desired plant, e.g., the apricot, that is affixed to the rootstock and whose production is desired. The general idea is that the rootstock and scion are both cut at an angle, and the vascular tissue of the scion is placed in contact with that of the rootstock, which then nourishes the scion and allows it to grow to maturity. It sounds like something out of a mad scientist movie, but it often works. To learn more about grafting generally, check out the link in the quotation above; to see details about grafting apricots specifically, see the video.) One reason why grafting is often used with apricot is that this tree is very particular about the soil that it will grow in, and grafting allows this constraint to be overcome. Keep in mind that for there to be a good chance for the graft to take, the rootstock and scion should be closely related. For example, apricots, plums, and peaches are closely related since they are all in the genusPrunus in the rose family. 

   

         

Since the growth characteristics of the plant are determined by the rootstock rather than the apricot scion, one should not place undue emphasis on the shape of the apricot tree. Nevertheless, here are pictures of the apricot tree, fruit, and flowers.

   

   

            

   

            

A curiosity is that most almond extract comes not from almonds but from apricot or peach pits, which happen to contain bioidentical compounds. These substitutes are used since it is cheaper to to obtain this compound in this way. Also, this gives an added feeling of safety to sufferers of nut allergies. Almond extract is an ingredient in Gwen Robinson's cherry pie recipe, which is the recipe I have used for the last forty years. It is a coincidence that an apricot pit looks like an unshelled almond.

Apricots appear in a vast number of products, perhaps because apricot is the beige of fruits. I will cover the big three of fruit product areas, namely alcohol, beauty, and food.

As for alcoholic beverages. you might start with mixed drinks such as the apricot brandy slush or the apricot raspberry shrub pictured below. Next in the gallery of pictures comes the Mr. Boston apricot brandy. Pepe has the Mr. Boston book of mixed drinks, so he could doubtless use this book to prepare numerous delicious cocktails with this brandy, though perhaps the other apricot brandies would serve as well. Various liqueurs, ales, and ciders follow. (We have a curiosity that links Pepe and me--a Cuba apricot-flavored liqueur with vodka from Denmark; see Wine-Searcher for details.)

                                             

[Continued in Part 2]