si dawson

I decided a sunny Sat­ur­day after­noon was the per­fect time to try durian. I'd had a small bite of one before, but was now deter­mined to try the whole thing. Choos­ing, buy­ing, open­ing & hope­fully hav­ing enough nerve to actu­ally eat one. I steeled myself to the dis­tinct pos­si­bil­ity of get­ting part way in & throw­ing the whole lot in the bin.

For the uni­ti­ated, a durian looks like this:

This came from ye reg­u­lar olde super­mar­ket down­stairs — so it's obvi­ously not that bizarre a fruit. It comes in a handy dandy car­rier bag, but the check­out girl still eyed it very sus­pi­ciously & placed it inside first one, then two plas­tic bags (which the spikes promptly & hap­pily ripped through).

It's dif­fi­cult to see in the above pic­ture, but there are tiny splits in the shell of the durian. When I bought it, this par­tic­u­lar split was about 2" long. By the next morn­ing it had expanded to this:

So, after much research­ing & watch­ing youtube videos on the mat­ter, I dis­cov­ered that you pry your fin­gers into these holes, and you can pull the fruit apart, thus:

This can only be described as.. uhh, vaguely sex­ual. *cough* any­way, it added to the expe­ri­ence, for me at least (I for­got to ask how the durian felt about it. Guess that's a guy thing)

So how big is a durian? Well, I wish I'd got a photo of this, but alas, I didn't think of it — it's roughly as big as my head. Instead, here's a pic­ture of my head:

Two keys points — 1. See how extremely uncon­vinced I am by the durian (this was before I started eat­ing it). 2. Note the exten­sive col­lec­tion of booze in the back­ground which will now prob­a­bly never be drunk. If you'd like it, just shout.

So, once you pry out a sec­tion, it starts to look like this:

And you can see the lit­tle fruit sec­tions inside. They have large soft­ish pips in them (which you don't eat, uhh, I think).

What do they look like? They look like ALIEN BABIES!!! No, I'm seri­ous. Check it:

I swear. You're steal­ing alien babies from the spikey moth­er­ship. This fruit is CRAZY. I kept expect­ing it to jump out of my hand and suck onto my face.

Of course, there's also another *cough* minor detail with durian.

Ok, let me explain. With most food, it smells more or less like it tastes.

In geo­graphic terms, durian smells like Okla­homa, but tastes like Nepal. They are NOTHING alike. So, in order to enjoy it, you kind of have to detach the part of your brain that links smell & taste, because your nose & taste­buds will be telling you com­pletely dif­fer­ent things. One part of your brain is say­ing to grab your cow­boy hat, the other your prayer beads & pitons. It just doesn't work.

The taste is.. hmm. very hard to explain. Remem­ber Char­lie & The Choco­late Fac­tory? How there was the chew­ing gum that had an entire three course meal in it? Well, it's sort of like that — except that after­wards you don't blow up to the size of a house. It's sort of creamy, a bit like cus­tard, sweet, but less sweet than banana. Damn deli­cious though.

Also, on the sub­ject of smell, the out­side & the inside smell quite dif­fer­ent from each other. I tell you, these things are stun­ningly weird. But ok, while we're on the sub­ject of alien foods, who the heck invented Daikon?

Coz I tell you, if that doesn't look like some kind of insane frilly UFO with mas­sive ver­ti­cal exhaust fumes, what the hell does?

Oh, and the durian? I'm off­i­cally hooked. I ate the whole thing in a day (prob­a­bly a bad idea, they're quite high in fat), & went back for more today. SO GOOD! I am offi­cially a hippie.