Fruits from the genus Garcinia (mangosteen, achacha, and related). They’re supposedly some of the best tasting fruit ever, but very hard to find in the US aside from specialty growers in Cali or Miami.
Fresh bamboo shoots.
Guavas
We have guava in the stores here in Florida but I’ve seen rhubarb twice in half a century.
Funny, I’m in NJ, and within the past month I’ve seen guava and rhubarb for the first time ever on the shelves. Haven’t gotten rhubarb yet, I really don’t know anything about it.
Don’t. It’s evil. Even though you might like it, it’s not worth the risk.
I was born, raised, and currently live in Florida. The guavas in Florida supermarkets are closer-tasting to plastic than the guavas I’ve had in the Caribbean.
Yeah I have only used them sort of unripe, for compote with so much sugar. But they do grow here.
I’ve seen rhubarb in the Midwest fwiw, just last week
I think it grows in colder places and isn’t popular enough to get imported here, I can get so many fruits that are exotic elsewhere, but apples and potatoes are expensive here, and rhubarb I just never see.
I’m biased towards tropical fruits so I think you have the better end of the deal. I actually thought rhubarb was a herb of some kind, learned that it was a fruit after your comment
It’s a fruit?! I thought you used the stalk, which looks somewhat like celery in shape. /a Midwesterner who has eaten rhubarb pies made/grown by a great aunt
Botanically it isn’t a fruit but it is a culinary fruit because of how it is used.
I have a 6 foot by 6 foot patch of rhubarb in Wisconsin that’s completely gone to seed because I don’t have enough freezer space to keep any more of it. It makes a great simple syrup for cocktails and of course classics like crumble and pie.
I’ve got a tree in my yard that pumps out hundreds a few times a year. I have to give them away. SoCal
I just got into guava recently. I live in Jersey and my local ShopRite started stocking clamshells with six guavas or so, ranging in size from a goofball to something larger than a goofball but smaller than a baseball. Maybe like billiards ball sized. I’d never eaten them before like a month ago, and so the seeds threw me T first, but I’ve got the technique down now and shit, when they’re ripened, nice and soft, they are fantastic. I worry about the day when I get to ShopRite and the guavas are no longer.
Literally about to go to whole foods to buy guavas because you reminded me of the taste 😭🤤 You should cut them and season them with salt and chili powder, they taste fantastic that way.
How bigs a goofball? The ones at work are always huge.
They’re the size of my kids, since they’re generally the target if my references to goofballs.
And I guess my phone thought changing golfball to goofball was what I needed. Maybe I should read a little better what I write. Maybe next time.
Jackfruit
I remember getting one when one of the supermarkets around here carried them and theyre huge fruits. Probably 20 pounds of fruit that we ate from it and by the time we were done I never wanted to see another one again lol. I wouldn’t mind trying them again now but probably maybe just a pound not a whole fruit.
A restaurant out here had a great jackfruit sloppy Joe for vegetarians but I think they discontinued serving it.
I have a hard time finding black currant
Isn’t blackcurrant illegal in the US? I remember hearing that somewhere anyway.
Such a shame, cassis (blackcurrant soda) makes for such a tasty drink.The plant itself is, you can get foods made with it.
I believe you can grow them as long as they are more than 150 feet from a white pine tree. The plants were originally banned because they were blamed for some sort of disease that jeopardized the lumber industry.
They are now legal to grow in many states. Unfortunately still not going to find it in a grocery store most likely. I grow my own in the backyard so I can have some at least part of the year. They’re perennial, very easy to grow, and produce a ton of berries. Gooseberries were banned for similar reasons, but are now also legal in many states.
You can order blackcurrant drinks online, as well as getting extract.
googles
It sounds like the problem was that they could host a fungus that affected other plants, but it’s been allowed on a state-by-state basis for some decades after they found a resistant variant.
https://www.grunge.com/879107/heres-why-blackcurrant-was-banned-in-the-us-for-over-50-years/
By the end of the 19th century, farmers noticed that blackcurrants had introduced an invasive species called blister fungus that killed white pine trees, per Business Insider. The fungus solely spreads through blackcurrants rather than from pine tree to pine tree. That means the U.S. was faced with a choice at the time: blackcurrants or the white pine. With national forests highly valued for the timber industry sales used to develop the U.S. as we know it, they chose to protect the white pine.
In the early 20th century, the U.S. government made it illegal to farm blackcurrants and put forth resources to eradicate all Ribes plants from the environment, according to Business Insider. Interestingly, European agriculture met this fungus long ago when it was introduced in blackcurrant plants, but they didn’t rely on white pine as fiercely as the U.S., and the “white pine was sacrificed to retain the Ribes,” according to “History of White Pine Blister Rust Control: A Personal Account.”
Blackcurrants come back
After more than half a century, scientists discovered a new variant of blackcurrant that was resistant to the fungal disease that threatened the white pine. Without the threat to the timber industry, the U.S. government “left it up to the states to lift the ban” blackcurrants in 1966 (via Cornell University). It wasn’t until 2003 when New York, where blackcurrants were most heavily produced in the late 19th century, became the first state to uplift the blackcurrant ban in the continental U.S. Since then, some other states like Connecticut and Vermont have also rescinded their bans. But neighboring Massachusetts and Maine (or “The Pine Tree” state) are some of the many other states in which such bans remain (per AHS Gardening, Mass.gov).
Yes! As a Scandinavian living in the US: I would love to see black currant, red currant, and gooseberries in my grocery store.
Gooseberries grow like crazy in Colorado, every other garden around here has at least one bush. Never seen them at a grocer though.
And cloudberries! I want to taste cloudberries!
Yes! Forgot about those.
Durians
They’re readily available in the LA area. You just need to visit an asian specialty market.
Best I can do is fart on a cantaloupe. Take it or leave it.
I rarely see leeks, and when I do, they’re extremely expensive. Such a versatile vegetable that I wish more Americans knew about!
I think that’s a local thing. My grocer carries them, and they’re always in stock. I line in the Midwest. But I seem to remember eating them a lot in Oregon, too?
They grow naturally where I live. Not the giant ones like Farfetch’d carries, but when I was a kid, I loved digging them up in the woods and just eating them raw lol
Where do you live where leeks are not common? Speaking for California here, they’re a common grocery store item.
Midwest here, I too can buy leeks any day of the week
Yeah, probably has more do to with proximity to at least a B tier grocery store. If your local grocer is Target, Walmart, or Family Dollar, then you’re only going to have access to the vegetables from Veggietales and bread from a plastic bag.
Cumquats. We can get them here, but I rarely see them. What could be better than a little orange you can eat like a grape?
I think you meant kumquats, your version may be creamier though. ;P
You can’t import yuzu fruits or plants. All the yuzu in the US is descended from the 100 original plants imported before it was made illegal.
But really, I want soft cheeses…
We can get yuzu fruit here (Florida) but couldn’t get the seeds to sprout, not sure how the trees are propagated. Anyway - the fruit is underwhelming, the zest is divine, I made a yuzu kosho, it is delicious.
Almost all fruit trees are clones. You’d need a cutting.
Google says they taste like a mix of lemon, orange and grapefruit. Is that accurate?
Sort of Meyer lemon with lime zest? The ones I got were not juicy at all, and what juice they had, I would prefer lime. But the zest of the yuzu is amazing, I do like it. You can buy yuzu sake, or a yuzu soda, to taste the flavor. Yuzu kosho is very different, savory and spicy, i made mine with grated fresh jalapenos and fermented it, absolutely divine.
More like lemon-lime-pomelo, but WDIY.
Bananas other than the Cavendish and a greater variety of potatoes. There are supposed to be so many varieties of each out there, but we only get one banana and 3 or 4 potatoes.
The cherimoya is also pretty good from what I remember, so I would like to have that again for >$5.
The variety of bananas in Vietnam was great. I was going to put that here since they are impossible to import quickly enough.
I had a cherimoya in Spain and I LOVED it. Impossible to find here in NA though :(
Big fan of cherimoya ✋ Looked into ordering some online once, the price is insane
I feel like this thread is going really be “available in your part of the US.”
Grocery stores and populations are pretty varied across the US. What you can easily get in a San Francisco, Manhattan, or Boise grocery store can differ quite a bit.
Sure but there’s also tons of produce that has a low shelf life or doesn’t travel well (e.g. bruises easily) so you don’t find it anywhere except right where it’s grown.
e.g. I live where Pawpaws grow. I’ve never even found a whole one because they perish so fast.
Oh man - It always feels like the pawpaws just hang out for ages up in the canopy whole and unripe to me.
I should have said, a whole ripe one, yeah
My best advice would be once they start falling on their own try shaking them out of the tree. But don’t try shaking too hard because it’s completely possible to shake unripe ones out too…
The original intent was to learn about fruits and veggies that most americans would be unaware of or dont have access to eg. brazilian grapes, ube, drumstick, adzuki beans etc. but good point.
Drumstick 🤤🥺
Strawberries that taste like they did 10+ years ago?
Strawberries are so easy to grow that they are almost invasive.
If you leave them alone, they will overtake whatever is near them.
Each strawberry plant I have sends off multiple runners, with multiple nodes per runner.
It is a very high exponential growth rate.
You can start with 4 and have over 100 in 2 years.
Except now you have 100 plants that all taste like shit, because all strawberries now taste bland or sour.
Spoken like someone who hasn’t grown strawberries any time recently.
I know this because we have a random strawberry bush in a crack in front of our garage but it’s just from last year and only making tiny berries right now.
In a couple years maybe I’ll have good berries.
Uh, do you maybe live around Missouri? We have false strawberries here.
Does the plant have 3 pointy leaves like this?
That sounds like a wild strawberry. The berries won’t get. Offer year over year.
I am not aware of strawberry bushes. Are you sure we are still talking about strawberries?
It’s a plant lol
If you can’t grow your own or go to farmers market. Get them when it’s early in the season (I.e. now) as a big reason they usually taste like shit is because they are harvested unripe and then ripen in transit, which causes them to be light in colour, watery and have that white centre to them.
But early in the season they are /more likely/ to be allowed to ripen on the plant.
I’ve been eating loads of strawberries this past week from my local big chain supermarket and they have mostly been amazing (and cheap too)
Wild strawberries are amazing. Sad they’re so hard to get a substantial amount of.
When I was a kid in the 80’s there was a place my Grandmother used to take us to that had hay rides to take you out into their strawberry fields where you’d pick your own berries and pay like 50¢ per pound.
Good memories.
You must mean like 5 or 10 right?
I can buy strawberries at the store now a days for $1 a pound.
It’s not common but it’s not really uncommon, maybe once every month or two
Like much store bought produce, grocery store strawberries are picked not fully ripe to make them easier to transport. On pant ripened most anything will nearly always be better than store bought, but you better be ready to use it quickly.
I’ve seen jeans with enough dirt caked on them that they’ll stand upright in their own (I once replaced the centre support beam on a cottage built on virginia clay by hoisting it up with a bunch of car jacks) but it never occurred to me to try growing strawberries on them.
:)
No clue, really, I was like 6. I know I would fill my Happy Meal bucket with strawberries and give the lady a quarter. I don’t know if I was getting ripped off or getting a discount for being a cute kid.
No, happy meal buckets were pretty big. That sounds like a decent deal. I would say you could fit a decent pound and a half in the old McDonald’s trick or treating buckets
I remember getting buckets in the summer too. They came with little beach rakes & shovels, and the lids were sand castle molds.
…now I’m getting all nostalgic & shit. 😐
We’re just getting old
Any of them before soil depletion and banana blight. Fruits and veggies tasted so much better in the 80s. Melons in particular taste lifeless now. Once in a while I strike gold at the local farmer’s market or in our own garden.
Melons taste just as good to me now as the 80s or 90s.
And tomatoes. Tomatoes used to be amazing. Even the worst ones were amazing.
Now they just taste like “wet”. If you want a good tomato you have to track down lovingly and carefully bred heirloom plants and grow them yourself.
OMG, yes. The flavor “wet” has been added to my lexicon.
Nah. Even a Burpee is good.
The main thing that ruins store tomatoes is that they pick them green and breed them for travel.
Pretty much any tomato plant that you buy will be bred for taste and resistance.
That said, heirlooms do have all kinds of crazy flavors and differences.
I bought a rainbow tomato seed pack, it had like 7-10 different varieties, I don’t actually remember.
The white tomatoes were a trip, with your eyes open they taste tart, but with your eyes closed they just taste like a really good tomato.
That said, heirlooms do have all kinds of crazy flavors and differences.
Yeah, I’d bet that some of them don’t last as long as the standard red tomatoes that you get in the store, but looking through heirloom tomatoes is kind of a trip, from a visual standpoint. Grocery stores seem to have pretty much standardized on about three red ones – and I’m not saying that they’re bad, but it does kind of mean that people don’t get to see a lot of variety. Unfortunately, I’m not a huge fan of just eating tomatoes plain, so never got super-interested in obtaining them, but they do look damned cool.
googles
Here’s a retailer that has images:
https://www.tradewindsfruit.com/tomatoes/
goes through looking for some interesting ones
Oooh white tomatoes. Ever had the purple ones? Or the ripe green varieties?
Yeah! They had white, yellow, green, red, purple, black, orange. I think it may have just been the seven.
I could never figure out when the green ones were ripe
That’s pretty much the case with any produce at the grocery store these days. It’s all picked too green. It makes me sad because I haven’t had a legit ripe avocado in ages.
Put it in a paper bag for a day or two, let the ethylene build up and it’ll ripen it?
Can put a banana in there with the avocados if you really want it to go quickly.
I’d love it if Stephen Hawking and Freddy Mercury were alive again
All those different kinds of banana. All we get is cabendish which is, like, the worst of all the amazing banana varieties.
We have cavandish and red bananas here but none of the more interesting ones like the giant hawaiian cultivar etc. So completely agreed.
I think they meant to compare Cavendish bananas to the red delicious apple, which is red nut not delicious
I know. I was pointing out that banana selection is limited and arguably not very interesting here.
It’s the red delicious of the banana world
