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Topics - red durian

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1
Recipes / Re-textured chempedak
« on: August 25, 2013, 03:44:23 AM »


If you find chempedak too slimy, you can always dry it.  No special equipment is needed. 

2



Now 5 months old, these plants are in no hurry to produce flowers.  Leaves are enormous and covered with thorns.



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I got these from Oscar a few months ago, but now need the money more than the books.









USD250 including shipping to anywhere in the world.

Please contact my wife if you would like to order or ask about the books.  deyuawork at gmail dot com  I don't have much free time at the moment so can't answer any questions or take the order.


4
On Friday, the wife, son and I will be heading SW from Kota Kinabalu in our little white MYVI  (see below) for a long fruit-hunting journey all the way down to Kuching.  It is not a good time of the year to hunt for fruits here, but I have no choice about when to take vacations.  Here in Tenom, the market has "dried up" with no durio, mangifera, or nephelium at the moment.
Fortunately, I managed to get a guide book called "The Etlingera of Borneo" last week, so maybe I can score a few of the edible species of that Ginger genus. The book includes 24 species with edible parts.


5

This big boy is known as the village cucumber and is grown here on the ridges around wetland rice.  It is used in soup.  I asked if it is just a mature version of a regular cucumber and the vendors said it was not.


Raw, it tastes pretty much like a cucumber.  No bitterness but significant acidity.


When I scooped out the seeds, they were very wet so I put them in a strainer and ...


got this much juice.
I added salt to the juice, but didn't taste very good.
I added some sugar to cut the acidity, but still didn't taste so good.
I added an ice cube and gave to my wife.
She drank some, added another ice cube and gave it back to me.
Strangely, we both sort of like it, but don't seem to be able to drink much of it.  It is more like tomato juice than a tree fruit juice.

The soup we made has the entire village cucumber (minus the seeds), half a chicken, lots of moringa leaves, some salt and onion.  It is very nice.

Vendors said that if I planted the seed fresh, it would be eaten by ants.  They advised me to dry the seed before planting it.


6
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Dacryodes rostrata, a Phoenix seedling
« on: March 07, 2013, 06:25:15 AM »
Recently watched my Dacryodes rostrata emerge from the soil, make some crazy-looking leaves and then die.  As it turned out, the crazy-looking leaves were not leaves and now the plant has some real, normal-looking leaves, the rumours of its death, greatly exaggerated.

7
I planted about 10 seeds in soil and got only 2 plants, however, my seeds stored in plastic baskets, in half-decomposed plant material (mostly leaves) have at least 50% to 90% germination.  I just moved some plants out of the leaves as they were a couple of inches tall, but retained the deep leaves in my plant bag.

8
Recipes / Bay Rum Oatmeal
« on: March 04, 2013, 07:30:39 AM »
This is a very simple recipe that is quite popular in Dominica.

Cook rolled oats in coconut milk, sugar and a few bay rum leaves.  It is a winning combination.

9
I dug up 3 small seedlings of Arenga pinnata the other day from a near 100% shade situation and gave each its own plant bag.  Trees are in the shade of a beluntas bush now.  After the shock of transplant has passed, what kind of light conditions will be ideal for my young palms?

10
video shows some low-tech coconut technology from Indonesia if economics isn't your thing.
Coconut demand lost on Indonesia farmers

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Tropical Fruit Discussion / Sterculia urceolata
« on: February 27, 2013, 06:59:27 AM »



This year I have finally tasted some things I have been waiting as long as 10 years to taste.  However, I have also encountered tropical edibles that are new to me.  It is always a surprise to taste something good that I have never heard of.  Today I had such an experience.  The thin flesh on the seed of Sterculia urceolata has an unusual quality: some saltiness!  On top of the sweetness which my wife said was "more like white sugar than fruit", there is a pleasant acidity like the flesh of cacao.  My wife did not mention noticing salt.  Fruit seems high in caffeine or some other stimulating alkaloid.  I ate all my fruits one after another and now I'm sad they are all gone.  I have been unable to find any info online to verify that the fruit is edible.  I tasted it because it was planted in a section of the horticultural park with cacao, tea, kola, and guarana.

12
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Kuching Artocarpus species fail to impress
« on: February 23, 2013, 10:07:18 PM »
I have just returned to Tenom from Kuching.  While there I had a thick fleshed jack fruit that I did not enjoy and a thick fleshed chempedak that was so bad, I could not eat it.  The chempedak was very easy to masticate, but both the artocarpuses were non-juicy and  had flesh that seemed to be full of tiny air bubbles.  They felt difficult to digest and were far far inferior to normal Jack fruit and chempedak.  I only sampled one fruit of each species, so this is statistically irrelevant, yet I find it hard to believe that such crap would appear in a city that is supposed to have great chempedak.

13
Tropical Fruit Online Library / Flora Malesiana free PDF
« on: February 16, 2013, 04:10:18 AM »
This one is volume 11, part 3, on Sapindaceae.  About half of the series is available.


http://ia600209.us.archive.org/19/items/floramalesiana11stee/floramalesiana11stee.pdf

14
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Macadamia won't set fruit. Why not?
« on: February 15, 2013, 08:26:26 PM »
There is a single Macadamia nut tree at the Tenom Horticultural Park in Sabah, Malaysia that flowers but never holds any fruit.  This is not a pollination problem because Macadamia nuts have perfect flowers, so what might be causing this problem?

15
In Belize, parrots make it their business to tear open unripe sapodillas for the seeds.  Does anyone know an easy way to stop or reduce this? 

16
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Lankan, a new-to-me Salacca
« on: February 12, 2013, 08:34:22 PM »
This is lankan (Murut), a very blonde-skinned hairy/thorny Salacca with skin that falls off the fruit just from picking it.  It is delicious, with a good mixture of sweet and sour, but more on the sweet side, is of medium astringency and has extremely firm flesh, the firmest of any Salacca I have tried.  Sorry for the terrible photo.


17
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Durio graveolens diversity is extreme
« on: February 04, 2013, 09:29:43 PM »
Currently I am eating 2 types of D. graveolens.

 One is very typical:  Red flesh, low sugar, fat about 30%, yellow skin, splits open on tree, sharp thin spikes, spherical form fruit... heavenly for me. 

The other is a D. graveolens "whiskey pollen" (which itself shows lots of variation).  This one has skin that is green, flesh that is cream-coloured, the spikes broader at the base, the fruit-shape is more like a durian, it is sweet, has maybe just less than 20 percent  fat, the pollen flavour is less intense and the fruit does not split open on the tree, or in the house when ripe (however, it is very easy to open with a little pressure)

Sometimes a whiskey pollen looks exactly like a typical red-fleshed durian on the outside, but this one is so different, it is only really the size, seed colour and flavour that gives it away as a 'whiskey pollen' type D. graveolens.  Unfortunately I have no camera now to photograph it.

18
Sorry I have no camera for a while to share photos.

I opened one Tahitian chestnut with a big kitchen knife, had some trouble prying out the nut with a butter nut, and then pressure cooked the monster (it was really big - 5 X 2.5 X 8 cm diameters.)

It had the texture and taste of cassava, but was more satisfying and nutty due to the higher protein and fat content.  We had it hot out of the pot, cut up into 20 pieces and dipped in ketchup.  Both the wife and I loved it. 

19
Just got an unexpected $1000 that I have to spend on Horticulture/Botany books.   Only have 3 titles selected so far:

The Durio of Malaysia
Euphorbiaceae of Borneo
Etlingeras of Borneo

I'd love books that focus on the edible plants of a particular tropical region.  Unfortunately I have to submit my list witbin 2 days.

20
Currently on the lookout for D. kinabaluensis.  I have seen no fruits, no photos of a fruit, no trees, no photos of trees, but have read that it is happy around 1000m elevation and is not only edible, but has "cream to yellow flesh that has a pleasant, mild flavour and aroma".

Does anyone have information about / experience with this species?  It is not a labeled plant growing at the Tenom Horticultural Park.

21
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Another Longan Sub-species
« on: January 26, 2013, 07:09:34 AM »
Bought these longans today.  As you can see, the colour of the flesh is greenish yellow and translucent and the skin of the ripe fruit is bumpy and green.  The texture of the flesh is a bit like the exploding juice cells in a pomelo and the flavour is like a longan with a soapy twist.   The soapy hint is pleasant, though so maybe soapy is the wrong word for it.  Separates very easily from the seed.

Does anyone know what this sub-species is?


22
This looks like it might be nice; 330 species, photos of fruits and leaves, range maps, etc
 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/584232123/tropical-fruits-of-the-world?ref=live

23
I have 6 seeds of D. graveolens "Whiskey Pollen" and about 70 seeds of B. angulata.

Whiskey pollen is a D. graveolens which is reported to be the most cold tolerant edible durio species,  seen 200m higher in elevation in Borneo than durian.  See photos and more description here:  http://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=4015.0
seeds are 5 USD each

Baccaurea angulata is called "bubuntong" in the Murut language.  See photos and more information here: http://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=4013.0

15 seeds are 10 USD

Minimum order is 15 USD and shipping is either around 11 USD for regular air mail, or 35 to 90 USD for Poslaju courier.



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This almost seems to be a different species it is so different from red-fleshed Durio graveolens (which I will refer to as "red durian"). My wife and I both like red durian (D. graveolens) very much.  My wife loves whiskey pollen (D. graveolens) even more, however, it is the only durio that I know of that I don't really like.  Here are the differences:

This has yellow-orange flesh.  Red durian is red-fleshed.
This has a very strong aroma of whiskey (not the alcohol aroma, but whiskey) and bee pollen.  Red durian has very little aroma.
This has a very high flesh to seed ratio of about 3:2 on an unaborted seed.  See photo above.  To the right of the seed is the flesh that has come off of that seed.   Red durian usually has much thinner flesh on an unaborted seed.
This has a stong flavour, just like the aroma with some bitterness from the pollen-flavoured element.  Red durian has a very subtle flavour with no bitter element.

Similarities: 
Both are more expensive than any other type of Durio here in Tenom.
Both have lower sweetness than a durian.
Both have higher fat than a durian.
Both have less water than a durian.
Both crack open while still on the tree.
Externally they look the same.
Both are the same size.


25
Tropical Fruit Discussion / Bubuntong (Baccaurea angulata) fruit review
« on: January 19, 2013, 08:38:31 PM »









Since Gouralata posted that these fruits were sweet, I have been hoping I would find them in Sarawak when I go there.  Imagine my delight when I saw them in my local farmers' market today.  This is the first time they have been sold here in the 18 months I have been visiting this market.  Here is my description of the taste:
The acidity is perfect and the sweetness a little low.   It is sweeter and less acidic than a domestic strawberry, but where the fruit loses marks is in the low complexity of its flavour.  Most Baccaureas that can be eaten out of hand taste very similar to me.  Also, the acid does not seem as wholesome as citric acid, leaning more toward the acidity in a carambola.  The flesh does not slip easily off the seed and requires some work in the mouth to clean it all off.  Since it can be eaten out of hand and since the tree is one of the most incredible trees to see in fruit, I think this is a fruit with a future for back yard growers.





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