Snake fruit (left), Rambutan (right) in Indonesia
Jakarta, Indonesia leaves some with an empty feeling, a feeling that suggests the city leaves a lot to be desired: potable tap water, for example, or a successful trip from point A to point B without an hour’s worth of traffic. However, I attributed that emptiness to hunger and filled up on delicious indigenous fruits such as snake fruit (or salak, in Indonesian), rambutan, and dragon fruit instead.
I first picked up a snakefruit at lunch in Jogyakarta, one of Indonesia’s largest cities located in central Java located near the country’s largest tourist attraction Borobudur. It weighs only around 90 grams and is shaped like a teardrop. Each teardrop is covered in a thin, scaly, brown skin that resembles the snakeskin that gives the fruit its English name. Its Indonesia name “salak” comes from the Indonesian word for bark. The fruit does not require a knife to eat. The waitress showed my brother and I how to slide the skin off to reveal a white inside divided into four sections like big cloves of garlic. Waitress then told us that the flavor is both “sweet and sour” and while many people like the fruit, she doesn’t. She said that the Yogyakarta salak (salak pondoh) is generally bitterer than its Balinese counterpart (salak Bali). We bit into the fruit, which had a texture comparable to the combination of an apple and a pear. I suggested it tasted like strawberry sour belts from Dylan’s Candy Bar, although I was not opposed because that’s my favorite candy. My brother, on the other hand, thought snake fruit tasted like banana Laffy Taffy. The seeds were enormous, resembling a cross between a chestnut and an acorn. Because the fruit is native to only Indonesia and Malaysia, and I’m thankful I got to try it while I was there because it was absolutely delicious.
At the same lunch, I spotted what looked like a small hairy apricot. It was a rambutan, a member of the lychee family whose Malay name literally means “hairy.” The outside itself was yellow and the hairs red, until I cut into the small fruit to reveal a gummy white fruit with a large seed in the center. I made an incision in a circle around the center of the shell to reach the center where the fruit was nearly translucent and tasted slightly acidic although it was very sweet. I was about to bite into the fruit before the waitress motioned, “NO!” because accidentally biting into the rambutan seed can be poisonous. She recommended sucking on the fruit until I could safely remove the seed from my mouth. The rambutan, a fruit eaten as frequently in Southeast Asia as apples in the United States, is the perfect amount of beautiful, flavorful, and dangerous, just like the area from which it comes.
The next morning at breakfast I tried the fruit I thought was both most beautiful and most flavorless. Dragon fruit are stunning to look at. The outside is bright pink with green leaves. The inside is bright white with small black seeds. Dragon fruit are common mostly in tropical climates with moderate rainfall, making Indonesia a perfect candidate for its cultivation. It was bursting with water and had the same texture of a watermelon even though it looked most like a kiwi’s center does because of the sesame-seed sized black seeds scattered throughout the white center. The taste is relatively bland and I am not sure I would eat an entire dragon fruit unless I was parched near death in the middle of a desert desperately searching for water. But, to be fair, it is so beautiful that I would recommend including it in any fruit salad to give it a more exotic and interesting appearance.
