This is an interesting species.  I could not understand why so many people in Sabah consider it to be their favourite fruit until about a month ago.   When you first eat it, it is just a sour thing with an unrecognizable flavour .  You realize that you can't eat a whole fruit all at once so it seems to have little value.  I ate it on and off and watched the salted bambangan pickle sit in my fridge for months.  It was only after about 14 months of eating it on and off as a sort of duty that I found myself with a plate of rice, some accompanying tempeh and vegetables and a sudden desire for the bambangan pickle.  I thought, "I could just squeeze some lime for freshness and acidity", but my body said, "No, it wanted bambangan."  Now, I find the craving for it comes with cooked food that is a bit dry.  Not a lot, just a spoonful on the plate.  The flavour is stong and wonderful.  It is now an essential fruit for me.

Reminds me of cupuassu (Theobroma grandiflorum) except:
1) it is addictive on the spot
2) it is almost always eaten as a sweet not a savory

"unimproved" cupuassu are TOO SOUR to eat out of hand and people have developed "improved" ones that are sweet enough to eat out of hand.  I consider that a horrible waste though because the cupuassu flavor quickly saturates on your tongue (using a lot doesn't lead to much more flavor than using a relatively small amount).  So the "unimproved" ones seem to give their own built in guide for how to use them.

Hope I get to try this mango relative sometime... but from the description it sounds like an acquired taste (like ginseng).

I think you'll have trouble sorting out the bad from the good because it seems like most of the problem is genetic.

It seems that people have variable sensitivity to some chemical in the fruit.  Some people are extremely sensitive and can't stand any surinam cherries, some people are moderately sensitive and like some of the fruits with a lower concentration of those chemicals, other people are not terribly sensitive and like most of them, finally some have no sensitivity and can eat all of them.

I'm either in the low sensitivity or no sensitivity group.  Most of them taste just fine to me.  In fact, I can't remember the last time I had one that tasted bad.  My wife (on the other hand) is at the other end of the spectrum.  A local garden has this fruit and they report most people try the fruit and are unable to even eat a whole one... I find that same plant produces fruit I enjoy.

Where did you get this booklet? My husband and I are in the process of adopting from the Democratic Republic of Congo; I'll have to add this to my reading list. Just for knowledge of my daughter's country of origin, of course

A friend mailed me a copy.  I think if you google it you might find it out there.  The Danforth's are missionaries so they put this book out to raise funds.  I'm not big on the missionary aspect but they did have a cool aspect to their mission- they helped people get fruit trees for sustenance and for generating cash... at the same time they tried to grow native fruits and see what it took to grow them.

I believe their original facility they had to abandon some time ago, I've heard they are still in Africa though.

Would you happen to have anything like this for Vietnam? 

Vietnam has Artocarpus tonkinesis (unlikely to see the fruit in a market however other parts of the plant are used in traditional medicine) and has some other slightly funky items such as Diallium / Floucourtia.  Also wampee is sold there.
 
Ho Chi Minh City / Saigon has this kick ass marketplace where there are a number of fruit vendors.  I saw (aside from the durian, mangosteen, longkong) one slightly odd item a snow white fruit that had the same shape as wax jambu (undoubtedly a Syzygizium).  I did not try that as I figured it was just another wax jambu (I like wax jambu but it has a good amount of fiber in it and I find I can eat only so much fiber, so often I pass it up so I can eat more of other fruits).  However, a coworker showed me pictures of such a thing (I think she encountered something that looked the same in Africa) which she said was sold under the name "Lytchee"!!!!  Apparently it tasted like lytchee too, quite odd.

If you contact this botanical garden in advance and ask for an english speaking tour guide that would be your best bet of finding anything rare. I don't think you're going to find rare garcinias or rare artocarpus at fruit vendor stalls in large towns.

I think seasonality will make it a poor harvest trip.  That being said I think places like Burma (which have been cut off from most of the world for a while) are probably slightly easier spots for finding odd stuff (its always an uphill battle though).  I suspect that there is more of a tendency to collect odd fruits from the wild, likewise to grow odd fruits.  Places that are more connected with the world at large tend to fall into growing mainly commodity crops and forget their natural treasures.  When in season they probably do sell odd things like Garcinia cowa, etc. at local markets in Burma.

Thanks for the tips...

Northern Thai border is only for crossing into border town of Burma and return the same day. To access the rest of Burma you need to fly into capital, Rangoon. There are plenty of people there that can be hired and speak English. It's very safe to visit now for tourists. A lot safer than visiting Chicago, Miami, or New York.

We fly into Yangon... (as you suggest).
We booked a private tour which was actually less expensive than the package tours where you're on a bus with a whole bunch of other people.  I was pretty livid after the last package tour because there were two occasions where I'd have wanted to stop the bus to pick up some fruit (would have taken 2 minutes or so) and the leader refused.  The other tourists on the package were nice, I just felt the service of a package tour is pretty poor and it is rather inflexible.

We're doing a cultural tour (yet again) but I'll try to sneak some fruit stuff in.  The problem is that it is pretty easy to find someone who knows something about Bagan.... but a lot more difficult to find someone who knows somethng about native Garcinia / Artocarpus...

Yeah, it's a lousy time of year for fruit.

When I asked my pharmacist about drug interactions with grapefruit (which I love) he said that the effect lasts for weeks, not hours and that there was no safe way to eat grapefruit and my daily medications.

I've always heard hours.... I could easily be wrong but that's what I heard.  You can google "grapefruit effect" or "furo coumarins" or various other keywords.  Look for articles written by scientists rather than some random hacks.  Some will talk about the timescale of how long the enzyme is "poisoned".

My recommendation is to give up the medications, if at all possible, and keep the grapefruit. Medications have a lot more side effects than grapefruits, all of which drug side effects are potentially fatal or health damaging. But doctors rather than going into that the poor grapefruit gets the brunt. We are a society addicted to pharmaceutical drugs, so many people popping 10 or more pills per day! If they were eating 10 or more fruits per day then they probably wouldn't need the pharmaceutical drugs.

That seems like pretty dangerous and poor advice.

While I will not argue that pharamaceutical companies are greedy and do lots of unethical things I think it is pretty obvious the best things to come out of 20th century medicine are the drugs.
There are things like penicillin and other antibiotics that have literally save many millions of people.  There are other things like lithium for treating bipolar disorder that have enabled people who would have otherwise had a horrrible life to have a functional and happy one.

Also when it comes down to it all things natural and artificial are chemicals, all things have side effects.  Grapefruit has side effects (that's why there is "the grapefruit effect" which has an impact not just on medicine but also on making otherwise non toxic foodstuffs toxic).

Some may be aware that grapefruit are terrible tasting, but they can also do some pretty nasty things to folks on a certain number of medications. Recently, studies have doubled the amount of prescription medications that are impacted by grapefruit, which can lead to increasing the potency of the medication and inadvertent overdose or rendering the drug ineffective. I guess its another reason to graft over that old grapefruit to a nice flicks yellow pommello or lemonade fruit

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health-fitness/warning-grapefruit-reacts-with-expanding-list-of-drugs/story-fneuzlbd-1226525021022

Pummello over grapefruit wouldn't be a great fix to this problem.
Grapefruit has relatively high concentrations of compounds known as furo-coumarin.  Pumello has concentrations of them at about the same level as Grapefruit.  In other citrus they are typically found in the peel such as lime and bergamot.

Parsips, and carrots also have furo-coumarins but they aren't as much of a concern (lower conc I think and also different ones that might be less "active").  Fig seeds also have these compounds.

Furo-coumarin basically tie up cytochrome P-450 which is an enzyme in your gut that acts to destroy a WIDE variety of naturally occuring plant toxins.  Without that enzyme foods and foodstuffs such as cacao, onions. garlic, brocolli, mushrooms.... become toxic as their "bad chemicals" are no longer broken down in the gut.

At the same time oral medications are effectively multiplied (because typically oral medications are largely destroyed by these same enzymes).  In some rare instances this might be a good thing (such as allowing people to take chemothearapy agents oraly rather than by injection, or for extreme cases like antiviral agents in dire situations).

So if you're afraid of grapefruit (for the furo-comarins, rather than the outright disgusting revolting hideous flavor) avoid pumello and the rind of lime and bergamot too.

Another way to deal with this problem is to eat grapefruit LAST.  The furo-coumarins typically tie up the cytochromes for a few hours.  If you eat grapefruit and have no food or medicine afterwards for many hours (like say at bedtime) there should be no issue.

Or just skip grapefruit since it is an evil and demented citrus.

When I interviewed the girl last year about the fruit, she gave me mostly good information, but with one error.  Here is what I recorded from our interview:

sour, but smells good…kepel means 'fist', tangerine sized... not sold in market..fruit rolled in hands like governor plum… lots of seed…yellow fleshed…a bit sweet

It is not sour, and I think she meant not that there are many seeds, but that the proportion of seed to flesh is high.  I was so happy to learn that the fruit should be rolled in the hands.  I know for governor plum that knowledge makes a big difference in the taste of the fruit.  I have not yet tried keppel unrolled to taste the difference.

I google translated something from Indonesian saying that the skin fights bad breath (I assume that is what "mouth deodorizer" means) but I can't imagine anyone eating the skin just as it is.  My local contacts have not heard this.

I've heard kepel varries in flavor quite a bit.  The description I usually hear is "mango + cinnamon".  The ones I had in CATIE were not terribly impressive, they were basically like a watered down and simplified mango (in flavor).

Legends about kepel are common.  There are some old legends that claim if you eat it you will smell like violets (I wonder if something is lost in translation there because I'm not sure that violets are native to Indonesia).  I ate 6-9 fruits in CATIE and nothing about me smelled any better than before (I wasn't seriously expecting it to, though I thought it might have an "asparagus" like effect on some things produced).

I really like the way kepel trees look.  They tend to be gnarled, that plus the califlori makes them look cool.  On my first trip to Indonesia I didn't notice the kepel trees, but on my second trip I kept seeing them (in various Kraton's and other sites).

ahaha BTW Dan, did you see the vid on Cambuci?

Where is the vid?  Actually maybe I shouldn't watch it... might blow my mind.

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I submitted but didn't vote as I don't trust myself 

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