It is mamón chino season. The colloquial translation is "Chinese sucker." You say "What?!?" It is a very popular fruit that people eat as dessert snacks. It looks a little a lychee and taste like the candy, SweetTart. From July to October, everyone and their brother has a roadside
stand with (usually) a handwritten sign, announcing, "Mamón Chino!" Known as Rambutan, this rare fruit tree, originally from Malaysia, was introduced some 40 years ago by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock as a new cash crop for small farmers. It was an effort to help diversify their farms as an option to traditional crops such as coffee or sugarcane. The program was a real success, mainly because this new immigrant to Costa Rica adapted really well to the bioregion. And Costa Ricans enjoy the taste of the fruit.
The Mamon Chinos is distinguished by their red and hairy skin. This leathery skin protects the sweet, milky-white pulp, which has a jelly-like consistency. In the middle of the fruit you find the almond-shaped seed fixed in the pulp. The first bite is a good chomp through the outer skin. The 2nd bite is like eating a grape with one big pit.There are 2 types of trees, a "criollo" and "Injertado." Injertado means grafted. We have a couple of injertado trees on our property that Lilo planted just a year ago and amazingly, they fruited a small crop. Though I didn't get much chance to eat them because M would harvest a few ever time he was down working on that part of the property. Fortunately, our friends Mike & Nina had a bumper crop so I did not go wanting.
The difference between injertado and criollo is how the flesh clings to the pit. The fruit from a grafted trees (like ours), has pulp that slides right off the pit. With criollo fruit, the pulp clings to the pit and you suck it off, ergo, the name Chinese suckers. After the pulp is removed, you can boil the pits and fry them. They are supposed to taste like chestnuts. We tried that but didn't really like the taste. Or maybe I wasn't doing it right. It is always a learning curve on cooking methods for all these different foods. After 8 months, I finally hit on the technique to make "patacones." That is a fried plantain patty, kind of like a round, fat french fry. I've also fine-tuned my plantain chips technique. Now I'm pan frying up dozens of savory, wafer thin plantain chips most
every other night. (Who needs Frito-Lay!) Since we are harvesting racks of plantains with about 20 fruit on each rack. I'm making a lot of chips and patacones. Along with the bananas, our potassium levels must be through the roof. We are eating about a half dozen bananas every day: banana ice cream, banana smoothies, bananas in yoghurt with tahini sauce (a tasty alternative
to peanut butter.) And we are giving away dozens.
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