Joanna James
Lucious, tropical fruit from the Maldives grow with sea breeze, sunshine and minerals from its rich land. If you’re planning a visit to the Maldives, don’t skip feasting on the country’s fruit. Filled with vitamins and minerals, these fruits are bound to offer your taste buds different textures and depths of flavour.
Let’s start with a more common fruit that everyone loves. Bananas come in various sizes, shades and differences in flavours and even texture. Some Maldives luxury resorts serve different variants of bananas for breakfast and offer banana shakes or fritters (desserts). At resorts like the Amaya Kuda Rah Maldives, you can ask them to add some to your dessert or look for a banana-infused cocktail.
Growing wild in shrubs or small trees, Indian Jujube is dark green and glossy on the upper side with velvety hair covering the bottom. The flesh is smooth and soft. Inside you’ll find a hard stone with two oval seeds. Ripe Indian Jujube looks yellow or reddish brown. Fully ripe jujube is mealy in texture, looks wrinkled and emanates a musky fragrance. Slightly unripe fruit tastes like apples. Buy this fruit at local markets in Male.
Pleasantly pink Java apples look like bell skirts. Most locals grow these trees in their gardens, and kids and adults love to bite into the juicy flesh. Java apples taste sweet with a bit of creamy tartness adding a unique depth to it. Depending on what you’re familiar with, this fruity taste is similar (slightly) to snow pear or a mix of watermelon and cotton candy. The flesh has a slightly loose wave and quenches thirst. You can buy Java apples from local markets.
Sometimes called sugar apples, these fruits are in colour and cone-shaped. The skin is scaly and the flesh creamy and sweet. Hence, the name custard apple. You can eat it chilled like custard, using a spoon. Custard apples are loaded with essential minerals and vitamins. And, a spoonful of custard apple will sit on your tongue, cooling your entire body and then delighting with its creamy, syrupy goodness.
Mulberry trees bear fruit early. The sweet berry is made up of compressed drupes just like a blackberry. These taste best when they turn dark purple (almost a shade of black). When they are green, mulberries are inedible and even red berries taste tart and unappetizing. But, once they turn dark purple, these berries taste heavenly. If you’re lucky you might walk by a mulberry tree, and pick as many as you like.
Pale yellow or earthy brown Sapadilla plums are grainy in texture. You can only eat ripe Sapodilla plums, as unripe fruits are hard to touch. The seeds are glossy, black and glossy like beans with a catch at the bottom. Be careful when eating sapodilla plum, as the catch can snag on to your throat lining. But, if you’re careful, they taste sweet and malty.
A true believer that the pen is a mighty weapon, ventures into reaching the minds of every reader with the earnest hope of leaving an indelible stream of thought.
A travel writer who has a passion for fashion and a deep interest in admiring new and exotic attractions around the world.
