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| Salak and Duku, Loving You Both |
It has been more than 4 years since the last time I visited my home country Indonesia. I miss all my family there, especially my dearest old mother and I also miss some of our fruits. It is not so hard to find Asian food here in Australia and many of Asian fruits are also available, but there are some less popular fruits that are not available. Some of them are salak dan duku fruits. What are these lesser known exotic fruits?
Salak
If you ask me to describe the taste of this strange looking fruit, I can only describe it in one word. To me, it has the taste of sweet red wine. I don’t know why exactly but perhaps both of them have high concentrations of tannins. Both have the sweet taste which is also slightly acidic and that unmistakably taste of tannins.
Salak (Salacca zalacca – Salacca edulis) is a native fruit from Indonesia and Malaysia. It belongs to the same family of palms. Although salak is the real local name, in English it is also known as snake fruit or snakeskin fruit. The scaly outer skin resembles that of snakes.
There are different varieties of Salak fruits. The sweetest and the most popular varieties in Indonesia are Salak Bali (Balinese Salak) and Salak Pondoh (Pondoh Salak).Personally I prefer Salak Bali than any other varieties. The Balinese variety has crunchy and juicier flesh and the taste is sweet, slightly acidic with a distinctive aroma similar to sweet ripe pinapple and sweet red wine. The pondoh variety which originally comes from the area of Yogyakarta in central Java, has drier and softer texture.
Salak varities have different colour of skin. Some variety is dark brown or light brown and there is also reddish brown colour. Although the scaly skin is rough and a little bit sharp, it is easy to peel the fruit by breaking the tip and peeling it way down. Once peeled, you will see the creamy ivory colour of flesh and it comes in few sections (mostly about 3 or 4 irregular sections). The big sections have a very hard brown coloured pip. They also come in different shapes and sizes. Some of them are round and the others are long with pointy tip.
The medical benefit of salak fruits is for stopping diarrhoea. So many people will suffer from a mild constipation by over eating this fruit. This fruit contains chemical elements of taninns, saponins and flavonoids. As for the nutrition value, it is rich in calcium, iron, vitamins B and C.
Duku
Lansium domesticum is a native tree and fruit of South East Asia. It is from Maliceae family. In Indonesia there are several varieties of this fruit, but there are two popular varieties. One is called duku and the other one is called langsat/langsep. They grow in big clusters and each individual fruit averagely has the same size of a walnut.
Duku fruits have slightly thicker skin than langsat and the colour is velvety golden ochre colour and it has sticky sap when you peel it. Once you peel the fruit, you will find that it can be separated into several sections, usually about 5 to 6 sections. Usually there is the biggest section which will have a big seed and when you eat it make sure you never bite this peep, as it tastes very bitter. With this big seed in the biggest section, most people just spit it out (don’t eat it). With the smaller sections which have a tiny seed, most people just swallow it without biting it. The smallest sections are seedless.
Good quality of duku fruits will have clear and translucent flesh and they are sweet. If the flesh colour is kind of opaque white then it will taste sour and slightly bitter. Duku fruits are always sold of the stems (loose) while langsat/langsep are always sold in clusters.
Langsat or langsep fruits are slightly bigger than duku and the skin is thinner. The good quality langsat fruits should be sweet and juicy. Langsat has distinctly different taste and aroma than duku.
How should I describe the taste of duku and langsat fruits? They are sweet. The flavour is something that I can not compare… It is only this fruit has this flavour. The best quality of duku will be very sweet and almost without sour taste at all.
Lancium fruits have beneficial nutrition contents such as iron, vitamin C and calcium. Many people will suffer a mild diarrhoea by eating too much of this fruit.
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Posted by Gwatlan on 2009-02-25 22:08:16 | Rating: | Views: 341
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