Our first taste of Soursop

Have you tried soursop?  We hadn't.  We hadn't even seen one before until our friend Debra bought one.  We were game to play too, so we picked up one of these odd looking, prickly, green fruit at Maria's fruit and vegetable stand on Monday.  We had no idea what to expect, and after some diligent googling, I still wasn't too sure if eating it unadorned would be okay.  Most sites I visited mentioned soursop juice, soursop smoothies, soursop ice cream.  But I wanted to keep it simple and try the fruit au naturel first. Supposedly it is ripe when soft to pressure, so last night was the night to give it a try.

Here is what it looked like cut in half.  

The skin is inedible, so I started scraping out the pulp with a grapefruit spoon and removing the rather numerous black seeds on the cutting board as I went.  Some sites I'd checked said that these were toxic, but it was a bit difficult to make sure I'd gotten them all.  The fruit was both fibrous and mushy (perhaps it was slightly overripe, actually?), so a little hard to work with.  I basically had to get my hands in there and feel for the seeds, then cut around them with a knife and pick them out by hand.  This is not what I'd call an exceptionally easy fruit to prepare, but it wasn't any worse than a mango, for instance, which requires cutting carefully around a large center pit.  I make Barry do that!

When all was said and done, I ended up with a bowl of off-white custardy mush that looked like a cross between mashed bananas and steamed won-tons.  Not super appetizing in appearance, but the fragrance was tropical fruity, musky, and nice.  Still, it took a bit of courage to take that first bite.

I tried it first.  It tasted better than it looked.  It was definitely sour, but sweet enough as well.  It tasted kind of like an combination of pineapple and banana, with a hint of cantaloupe.  The texture was both fibrous and mushy, not completely appealing, so I can see why it's normally used more in recipes than on its own.  Still, not bad.  We ate about half of it and saved the second half to throw into a fruit smoothie today.  

Would I buy it again?  The jury is still out.  It's definitely a nutrional powerhouse, containing a variety of vitamins and minerals, and is low in calories.  It may even help in the treatment of cancer.  Here are some additional resources if you want to learn more about this exotic fruit:

• The Health Benefits of Soursop
• Can Soursop cure cancer?
• How to make Soursop ice cream