Pomelo: Not Nature's Candy
Since moving to Thailand, my life has been enriched by many things. For you faithful blog groupies, you may recall my post on the wonders of the lychee. Well, now I'd like to share my experience with a pomelo. I had never heard of a pomelo until I moved to Thailand about 7 months ago. When packaged in the market or grocery store, it's been peeled so it's only the flesh that you get and it looks kinda like a clearish/whitish grapefruit. I was told it tastes like that too. I wasn't too curious after hearing that being as I don't really enjoy grapefruit at all. Anyways...this past Friday, Panida, the world's coolest Thai teacher gave us a big green ball that she called a "som
oh". She said it had come from Chiang Rai which is about 2 hours away. Basically, she said it was like a HUGE orange. BTW...some of the oranges here are green on the outside. We graciously accepted and I tucked it under my arm like it was a fat baby then dropped it in the backseat of the car--which I would never do if it really was a fat baby. I was intrigued. The texture was just like a basketball...thousands of little bumps. It probably weighed about 7 pounds. The color of the peel was a mossy green and wouldn't lead anyone to believe that there's something sweet and delectable inside.
Panida told us to wait a couple of days and it'll be super sweet and delicious (aroy mahk!). So, tonight we were super jazzed to finally get into this big green bomb! Silly me, I thought that since it was kind of like an orange/grapefruit I could just peel it. Wrong! It didn't exactly work like that. Little did I know that there was about 2 inches of white angelfood cake-like stuff beneath the bumpy green basketball exterior. After a few tries, we finally got to the flesh. It was so odd. It smelled really sweet so it didn't take me but a second to dig in and try it. Busted! It totally was NOT as good as it smelled. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe it needed more than a few days to be ready to eat. But, I don't think I'll be picking up any pomelos any time soon. Definitely NOT nature's candy!
Check out the photos by clicking on the slideshow at the top of this post...even Moo was curious!
3 comments:
I actually am a fan of pomello / som oh. Most of it is fairly bland tasting, but I have had a few fairly sweet ones too. It never tasted bad to me, it just usually tasted fairly plain and I guess that was good enough for me since some of the fruit was disappointing.
WEED, LOOKS TO ME LIKE A TENNESSEE WATERMELLON WITH A GRAPEFRUIT IMPLANTED INSIDE AT A VERY YOUNG AGE. LOVE YOU, DAD....
I had some of that, right? The kind that's already peeled from the grocery store? Yeah, I liked it. It does taste like a milder version of a grapefruit. Mmmm, delish!
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