Happy (Green) Hearts Day!

I am sure you are saturated by all things pink and red today. Something to refresh your eyes — heart shaped, twisted looking guyabano fruit (soursop).

This must be the Hunchback of Notradame of the guyabano world (they are supposed to be spherical and symmetrical, check out the wiki specimen below) but at a certain angle, it looks like a green, cartoony heart. I don’t have pics of this fruit from the inside in this post though, since this one was on its way to my brother’s house. The long ominous looking knife is just for scale.

Frankly, I don’t eat guyabano, finding the combination of milkiness and sourness a little too confused for my taste buds and I did not want to be any where near the milky, sticky sap. I had vague memories that guyabano tasted and smelled like yogurt drink.

We used to have a huge tree in our garden that produced profusely. Unfortunately, the tree was also infested with hantik, huge red, weaver ants who loved the sweet fruit as much as my parents. The ants would make big tents out of the guyabano tree leaves and would attack overripe fruit that already burst at the seams. The ant nest really looked like the picture below.

Braving the ants, my parents would make smoothies with guyabano pulp, evaporated milk and shaved ice throughout the summer. Nowadays, they content themselves to splitting the fruit in half, spooning out the creamy flesh and spitting out the black seeds on a plate.

Thanks to my dad who suggested that I use this as my valentine special. Such fruity love.

More information on soursops below from wiki.

The Soursop (Annona muricata) is a broadleaf, flowering, evergreen tree native to Central America: Mexico, , the Caribbean and northern South America: Colombia, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela. Soursop is also native to sub-Saharan African countries that lie within the tropics. Today, it is also grown in some areas of Southeast Asia. It was most likely brought from Mexico to the Philippines by way of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade. It is in the same genus as the chirimoya and the same family as the pawpaw.

The soursop is adapted to areas of high humidity and relatively warm winters; temperatures below 5 °C (41 °F) will cause damage to leaves and small branches, and temperatures below 3 °C (37 °F) can be fatal. The fruit becomes dry and is no longer good for concentrate.

Its flavor has been described as a combination of strawberry and pineapple with sour citrus flavor notes contrasting with an underlying creamy flavor reminiscent of coconut or banana.

via Soursop – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.