And Now for Something Completely Different...

DURIAN:

So have you ever been to the fruit section of an Asian market, and seen a very large spiky brown fruit thing, that is of questionable edibility? That is a durian, a fruit that I have heard described as having a delicious taste with an intensely awful odor. Well, thanks to my travel buddy Jose, this morning I had my first opportunity to try this exotic fruit.

The Smell:

It sort of tastes smells like...actually I think Jose probably had the best description: "like garlic, onion armpit." And that my friends, is probably the most apt description that one could come up with. It's not that it smells bad per say, in fact, if someone was sauteing onions and garlic in olive oil, I would find the smell to be quite to delicious. It's just that, when a similar smell is coming from a great big brown, fruit-like thing, it's a bit odd.

The Appearance:

The whole things is kind of a shame because the durian is actually an incredibly well designed fruit. When you cut open the durian, you'll find neatly divided sections of large portions of yellow flesh that pull easily away from the pulp of the fruit. It's almost as if each section of the fruit becomes it's own single serving bowl of durian, perfectly portioned to feed one hungry, albeit somewhat daring, individual. The texture of the fruit is very soft, and somewhat gooey, almost like overripe banana. Incredibly easy to eat, you need merely to arm yourself with a spoon, and dig in to your heart's content. Of course, that assumes that your heart is content with garlic-onion-armpit smelling fruit.

The Taste:

Well, I can't say that I wasn't warned about eating durian. It's just that the experience of eating the fruit was completely different from what I had imagined. Based on previous descriptions, I was expecting something that smelled of rotting meat or vegetables, but had an intense, sweet, tropical fruit taste. Smell: bad, taste: good. Instead, it tasted like slightly sweet onion-garlic-armpit overripe banana. You can hold your nose, you can breath out when you take in a spoonful, but there's no getting past the fact that the smell is pervasive, and that we taste with our noses as well as our tongues. Add to this the soft, gooey, slippery texture, and you have a less than desirable dining experience. Granted, the one we ate may have been a little under ripe, but my other travel mate, Chris, described a ripe durian as having a sweeter taste, but at the trade off of smelling like rotten vegetables. Yech...