JF, the #4 that I tried was not very good, it was under ripe and was a bit chewy, not sweet, and had no acidity. I bet you had a properly ripened fruit andine was a day or two under ripe.
I love Cherimoyas with a lot of acidity. Some of the moyas were just pure sweet with little to no acidity and I did not like these at all. There were so many different varieties and they taste so different. Some had a strong bannana flavor but this one lacked acidity, some had a strong vanilla flavor and others had excellent Cherimoya acidity.
Selma had great acidity , probably the second or third most acidic. By acidic, I don't mean that it is sour like a lemon, it is sour but what I mean is that it is very mildly sour/acidic in a good sense. Selma or #16 which I presume to be Selma was the only fruit that had a very very mild berry undertone in its acidity. This may be from the placebo effect because I did see the fruit was slightly pink but it may also be because whatever gives this fruit it's color also gives it the berry flavor, very much like how there is some berry undertones in red/magenta/purple Dragonfruit.
Very odd to me is that I did not taste any variety that resembled El Bumpo, my all time favorite variety. To me, El Bumpo is very sweet with great acidity and a very slight undertone of cotton candy. I would have to assume that El Bumpo was in this tasting because it was the winner last year but I can't identify any of the varieties I tasted as El Bumpo. Perhaps they served an underripe one?
There was one horrible variety, I believe it was #14, that to me tasted like Raid insecticide. It was absolutely horrible!
My favorites from today's tasting is 1, 10, 16, 19, 8, 2, 12, 19. #1 had the most acidity and was very sweet with an excellent sugar acid balance and great texture. All of these ones I listed are the varieties that my palate detected as having the most acidity.
Remember these these rankings are based on taste and texture alone. The fruit were pre cut so we don't really know what they look like on the outside and we didn't know about there size. I'm glad we didn't know what variety they were when we taste tested them but I do wish that there was another room with the same samples but with their names so we can find the varieties we plan on purchasing and really sitting down and cleanse our palates to get a better flavor profile put a flavor profile to each named variety.
In all honesty, there were crackers and water available but with the long lines, I felt bad making others wait for me so I went through all varieties sequentially without cleansing my palate. I did go back to certain numbers a few times to make sure that the variety was truely acidic or tasted like what I thought it tasted like and not because the previous fruit masked this ones flavor.
I'm guessing one of my top picks is Dr white or Booth, both of which were among my tops in previous years. does anyone know what number El Bumpo was? Also, when will we know what the results are?
Simon
