Pangium edule, a misunderstood and luscious fruit

[Mike T]

Some of you may have noticed a fruit that stevo posted pics of a few weeks ago. It was Pangium edule which the literature is ambivalent about the eating qualities and whether the consumer experiences ill effects. I also acquired some when stevo did and ate the fruit with trepidation at first and with gusto later on. I asked about the fruit by enquiring with seasoned fruit campaigners who did not give glowing reports of the taste and warned it might make me sick.
I found it had a soft mango like quality with pineapple and papaya elements and was one of the best tropical fruits. I suffered no ill effects after eating large volumes and was told by the grower that this large fruited Mariana Islands variety did not have the cyanide of other types.
As luck would have it the grower dropped a large hard unripe fruit and an over-ripe one for seeds to me today.
 

Here is the unripe one looking like the biggest mamey sapote or capuassu in the world.


Here is the soft over ripe fruit that I will cut open.



Yes it is too far gone to eat but is a bit like capuassu still..


The structure inside is not unlike some Annonas. Stay tuned for the grand opening of the currently unripe one.

[KarenRei]

Very interesting. I knew you could ferment the seeds to make them edible, but I'd never heard of pangi that you could just eat fresh without getting sick - let alone that it would be a quality fruit.  I wonder what the results would be if it were sent in for lab testing for cyanogenic glycosides?

[EvilFruit]

I remember reading that Pangium edule seedlings takes a very long time to start fruiting even in their natural habitat.

Is that true ?.

[Mike T]

I understand they are not fast to open their account and 8 years in good conditions is normal.

[EvilFruit]

Very interesting. I knew you could ferment the seeds to make them edible, but I'd never heard of pangi that you could just eat fresh without getting sick - let alone that it would be a quality fruit.  I wonder what the results would be if it were sent in for lab testing for cyanogenic glycosides?

In Indonesia, They use the seeds as a black food dye.  I believe they boil the seeds first like chaya leaves , and then dry them.

[KarenRei]

I'm collecting more info on this species. Do you know any of the following:

 * How fast it typically grows in good conditions?  (Or contrarily, since it's around 8 years to production: how large it usually is when it starts producing). It's apparently fast-growing in its juvenile period?
 * How sure are you about that 8 years?  Useful Tropical Plants says 10-15 years.
 * The flowers are supposedly fragrant. Is it a *good* scent?  And how long are the flowering / fruiting flushes?  Apparently they're 1-4x per year.
 * How long the flowering time, fruit maturation time, or fruiting season is?
 * The breeding system is supposedly "mainly dioecious" but sometimes yielding hermaphrodite flowers on the male inflorescence - do you know how common this is, and how the (quantity? quality?) of the fruit on the males compares to the females?
 * Anything about its desired cultivation environment?
 * Since it's normally grown for its seeds in most places, I presume the seeds take up a good chunk of the fruit? Were the seeds problematic in eating it?
 * Compared to how much space the trees take up, how productive would you say they are? I'm sure you don't have actual yield figures, but is there any other (more common) fruit tree you'd compare its productivity to, on a mass basis (taking into account that it fruits multiple times per year)?

Massive tree. Apparently can get up to 60m and 120cm in diameter, not counting buttresses. Also apparently uses the same trick as coconuts; its seeds float and can be distributed by the waves.

It's surely not a plant for us here ("large" x "long time to fruit" x "fast growing during that time" x "potential risk"), but still interesting enough to collect info about 

[Mike T]

Karen some may say that Iceland is not a place for tropical fruit also but it is best not to assume or rely too heavily on written accounts. It wasn't a cyanide driven delusion that made me recommend it and all the requested information didn't come to me in an altered state from eating the fruit but I will relay some what I know.
The parent tree grows alone and took 8 years to fruit and it isn't large like a mango tree, but is highly productive. It may get large in time but probably not like a santol, matisia or pometia.  A 3kg fruit I previously ate and collected the seeds from yielded around 0.5kg of seeds and had a rind of similar weight. The flesh yield was very high and it was tasty like melting mango with other pleasant fruity overtones. There was no taint, little acidy or unpleasant after-taste. The trees owners consume large quantities of flesh without ill effects.
Soursop, cashews, almonds, ackee and many other fruits have also been accused of being toxic.

[KarenRei]

It wasn't a cyanide driven delusion that made me recommend it and all the requested information didn't come to me in an altered state from eating the fruit

Oh no, wasn't by any means attempting to suggest that!  I asked because I appreciated your review; more to the point, it pushed P. edule from "not worth my time in collecting and curating data" into the category of "not practical for us, but interesting enough to be worth having curated data in the database about it" 

Thanks for all of the extra info, that's superb! 

Would you say that a good guestimate on the growth rate is maybe half a meter (1 1/2 feet) per year on average?

The trees owners consume large quantities of flesh without ill effects.

The fact that there's no bitterness is also a good clue that cyanide levels are low (although I'm still curious if they're present at all    ).  Cyanogenic glycosides are often bitter.  With cyanide-containing plants, the more cyanide-rich ones are almost always the more bitter ones.

Soursop, cashews, almonds, ackee and many other fruits have also been accused of being toxic.

Well... let's just say that I wouldn't recommend throwing caution to the wind when it comes to ackee...    It kills something like a couple dozen people per year. Just just a couple months in Haiti in 2001 36 people died from eating insufficiently ripened ackee.

Lychee is another one that's like that. Perfectly safe when properly ripened, but it kills kids who don't know any better and eat fallen immature fruits.