THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (UK)
I had to discard Adam Leith Gollner’s book The Fruit Hunters after the first chapter, I was so maddened by all the amazing sounding fruits I was missing. There are thousands of fruit varieties that we never see in our supermarkets. Magical tropical fruits oozing with new flavors; mangoes that taste like pina coladas, gingerbread plums, ice-cream beans that have a candy floss like edible foam inside, and the milk orange that emits a creamy mist when its peeled.
So imagine my delight when the staff at the Hana Maui hotel in Maui suggested they arrange an exotic fruit tasting at the nearby Ono Organic Farms. Hawaii is one of Gollner ‘s top places for experiencing ultra-exotic fruits. Most aren’t native to the islands, instead their seeds arrive secreted in immigrants suitcases, float in on air currents (scientists have trapped and catalogued thousands of airborne species), or stow-away in the digestive systems of migrating birds.
My day at the Ono got off to a rocky start. Barely had I been introduced to ‘Chuck’, AKA Charles Boerner, who founded this farm in the 1950s than he was called away for an emergency. One of his workers had sliced into her knee with a machete. So a young volunteer stepped in. There were three of us from the hotel, eagerly sitting on plastic seats around a table loaded with fruit. A lot of it didn’t look that delicious from the outside; there were several big gnarly brown and yellowish fruits, some had worse wrinkles than a Shar Pei and others that looked like small wood balls. I hoped it wouldn’t be a disappointment. I had skipped lunch in preparation.
No sooner had I peeled my first Longan, then I was in bliss. It tasted like Madeira Sherry in fruit-form. The Longan or ‘dragon eye’ is a member of the soapberry family (that includes lychees), but this one’s gelatinous white flesh has notes of nutmeg, cloves and cardamom mixed in with an incredible musky sweetness. I devoured about eight, tossing the shells into a pail at my feet, before moving on to try a heart-shaped Atemoya. This big green fruit looks like a badly melted wax rendition of a bunch of grapes. It has a white custardy textured flesh on the inside that seems to be perfumed with pina colada and vanilla. I nibbled around its huge black inedible pips, while our guide informed us that the fruit is good for weight loss and lowering blood pressure.
Over 90 minutes, I devoured as much as I could eat of 20 exotic fruits with names like sour sop, chico sapote, rambutan, egg fruit (which has the texture of hard boiled egg yolk), lilikoi, ice cream banana, candy apple banana and the addictively sweet and musky Red Cuban Banana. Even after a lifetime as a food writer, I found this more exciting than a 20 course tasting menu at a Michelin-starred restaurant and delightfully free of all the falderal. There is nothing fancy about Ono Organic Farms, the tasting is held in a little partially open-air shed half way up an almost vertical hillside, reached by driving over a bouncy homemade road. The owners will also give you some of their home-grown coffee and cocoa beans and show you around the farm.
The next day, I stopped by the Ono Farm stand in the center of Hana, in pursuit of more Longans. I also picked up a bread fruit to try. The assistant offered me gloves to wear cutting into its orange nubbly skin, but I refused thinking: ‘What harm could a little juice do?’ But it turns out the fruit oozes a white sticky substance that Hawaiians use to glue canoes together. Before long, I had welded my hand to the fruit and the fruit and knife to the chopping board. Later I discovered you’re supposed to eat the fruit cooked. And that dear reader, is why it is useful to have a guide.
Ono Organic Farms Exotic Fruit Adventure tel: + 1 808-268-1784 email:onofarmsbusiness@gmail.com. website: onofrarms.com
Lucie Young 