Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Tuesday, September 23 - Strange Fruit


 
 
                The Gaumful, also known as the egg-bearing fruit, is a sweet type of fruit found in the south and south-eastern areas of Thailand. They are red with dark purple, curled, tassels on the exterior, and have a harder, waxier exterior. The interior is softer and is colored sunset orange. Now their appearance might be strange, the stranger part of this food is what’s found on the inside. If you carefully cut open one of these fruit, you can find a curved, white egg growing inside of them. Being a newly discovered food, it is unsure if animals, insects, or even the fruit themselves are responsible for this. We are unsure if this egg is edible or if it contains any sort of organism or seed inside of it.

                Despite the fact that these fruits grow eggs inside of them, they are still edible and quite sweet. After you extract the egg, you can use the shell of this fruit to fill it with practically anything. You might want to be careful with what you fill it with though. The insides have a type of nectar that coats the inner shell that gives the fruit its sweetness. According to natives of Thailand, mixing a spicy filling with the sweet shell is very popular and loved.

                There are no known relatives to it, but some research point to mangoes as a distant relative to them, due to very similar inside taste and consistency, as well as being grown and harvested around the same area. Thailand is known to be one of the top mango growers in the world, coming in third, just under the People’s Republic of China and India. Since the Gaumful fruit is similar to the mango and grown near them, it wouldn’t be a surprise if they started being harvested and sold world-wide along with the mangos.

                Gaumful fruits seem to not only survive, but thrive in Thailand’s hot, humid, and rainy climate. From this information, we can assume that the egg-bearing fruit could also survive in countries near the equator where rain and heat are present. Tropical southern islands might start importing and growing these fruits of their own when more are harvested and raised.

                Thailand is not currently exporting many of these fruits, but it is now widely eaten and sold to inhabitants in Thailand. Many are cut open and filled with many different flavored fillings, such as, spicy, sweet, salty, and other fruit flavored pastes. Since they are a hit in Thailand, they might become popular with the other people of the world.

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