bucaio: July 2010

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Davao is Not Just Durian

Davao is fruit-land. It is home not just to durian but many other fruits that are not ordinarily found anywhere else in the Philippines. Davao pomelo, for example, is a class of its own among all other pomelos growing around the country. It is the sweetest, perhaps because of its size - it is one of the smallest - so the sweetness must be from concentration of flavor.

The average size is slightly larger than your two hands cupped together. The segments are pink, the juice has no trace of acidity, the seeds minute. All in all very kid-friendly, so I was constrained to buy crate-fuls of them to bring home to the children. And of course it is the kids' favorite, as the husband had carried or shipped crates of Davao pomelo to us whenever he had been in the city.

Photo above was taken from a pomelo mobile stand outside the shopping mecca Aldevinco, at the junction of CM Recto and Manuel Roxas Avenues. At Php40 a kilo for three to four pieces a kilo, it was the cheapest we got in all of Davao. Pomelos at the durian stands beside Magsaysay Park were selling for Php70/kilo.

Note that the pomelo skins were speckled. I spent quite some time talking to the vendors about the quality of the fruits, and they spent an equally devoted time explaining to me about the difference between a speckled fruit and a flawless one.

There's basically none, because the cottony rind between the skin and the fruit pulp is thick enough to insulate the edible part from any external damage. But the immaculately-skinned pomelos carry a premium because they are perceived by buyers as the better, and undamaged, fruits. They even broke open samples from both camps and offered them for a taste-test, which proved them right.

The flawless ones were going for about Php20 more, so I got the speckled ones. They are the kinds I now hunt for whenever I see pomelos being sold in and around Metro Manila.

To save on space and possible charges for excess baggage I asked that several pomelos be peeled. For every four pieces peeled about a kilo was removed from the total weight, which, considering the volume I bought, was not bad at all. But I didn't have everything peeled, though, because I was told the pomelos would sweeten more unpeeled. And I was instructed not to put the peeled fruits inside the refrigerator to prevent them from drying out.

Mangosteen is another fruit we lesser mortals living in Luzon are not privileged to have in abundance around us. So whenever I am in Mindanao or in the parts of the Visayas that are close to the island, I try to bring home as many kilos of mangosteen as the airline allows. Especially now that there are documented studies of the super-nutritional value of the fruit.

Mangosteen was selling for Php50 a kilo when I was in Davao, but I think this has gone down quite a bit nowadays as the fruit is now in season. Fruit concentrates and supplement pills were also being sold, as well as the dried rind of the fruit, which piqued my interest quite a lot.

It turns out the dried rind are used to make tea, because that is where the supernutrients are actually found, not in the edible pulpy seeds. At Php35 per kilo ready for transport in a sealed plastic bag, they come in cheap, but I didn't buy because I decided I'll just save the rinds from the fruits that I bought.

Marang and rambutan from Kidapawan. I first tasted marang in Los Banos, Laguna, which province is also a known producer of rambutan. But the Kidapawan variety is vastly different - the flesh more firm, still sweet but not as sugary sweet as the Laguna variety, and the seeds bigger.

Mangoes in Davao are more like their counterparts in other Southeast Asian/Asian countries, both in taste and size. The taste is just like the variety called Indian mango, or even apple mango, very mild sourness when unripe, but medicinal in flavor when ripe, which we don't like to eat in Pangasinan.

But these mangoes are humongous. As in immensely humongous. Those are durian fruits beside them, and they are even bigger!

Dwarfing a heap of dalandan.

Extra-large "American" green lemons (as labeled by the vendor), from Samal Island. The biggest is almost the size of a Davao pomelo. The flavor is not as bright as a lemon's, though. More like a lime.

Pineapples in Davao are bright orange, not the pale yellow we commonly encounter. But they are of the small, sweet variety. One mobile cart vendor has an ingenious way of skinning them - employing a sharp bolo to carve a cylinder from the inner fruit core, doing away with the labor-intensive business of carving out grooves to remove the "eyes."

Friday, July 09, 2010

My Durian Epiphany

Everybody who had been to Davao always had this line to tell me - the smell of durian assaults you the moment you step out of the plane.

I’ve never been to Davao before. Besides being too far from Manila so that airfares were never slashed down, and because there are no natural wonders, like a nice beach or a waterfall or a raging river or a thick rainforest, that beckon to me, except of course Mt. Apo (the country’s highest peak) which is beyond my proficiency level at the moment, I never pursued any trip to Davao, dreading the thought of breathing the (in)famous scent every single second of my stay in the Philippines’ largest city.

I’ve eaten durian only once before in my life. Only a tiny morsel, and that was enough for me. While every single personnel working on the floor where my office is located mobbed the highly odiferous fruit sent from our Davao branch, shoveling into their mouths handfuls of the stinking flesh like a pack of dogs that had not eaten for days, eyes rolling upwards and mouths agape, I took a bite, and retreated.

It was like eating butter redolent with raw garlic. I like butter, and I adore garlic, and I love them together in anything savory. But to find the combination in a fruit is nothing short of bizarre.

Friends, and durian fanatics, insist that I sampled an inferior fruit. And I always countered that, well, I’ll never know if it was inferior, because, well, I vowed I will not have a second sample to compare it with.

But stubbornness is a punishable trait, I’ve learned early on in my life. Perhaps my employers became aware of my unstinting narrow-mindedness when it came to Davao’s pride, so they sent me to the city. I bargained for a balikan trip (outbound and inbound flights within the same day), but compromises have no place in a chastisement, so I was in Davao longer than my usual 24-hour out of town trips.

I always maintain a modicum of honesty, so when I arrived in Davao and the first thing that the locals asked, even before querying about my flight and all, was how I felt towards durian, I answered truthfully. I wasn't surprised when everybody declared that all out-of-towners couldn't leave Davao without first partaking of durian.

It didn’t help that on that trip I was with two crazed durian lovers, who had to pass by the fruit stands each and every night of our stay to get their durian fix. As I was a lowly subordinate I had to go along with them on their post-dinner trysts.

On my first dinner in the city our hosts ordered durian float for dessert. Incorporated in any dessert, I can tolerate durian. In fact I eat durian ice cream. But the durian in the float was so pungent it was barely dessert.

Curiously, though, the locals hardly finished theirs, while we were constrained to scrape clean our individual dessert plates. The reason - they only want the fresh fruit, not gussied up in any fancy dessert. Such hardcore loyalty impressed me.

And so they proceeded to take us to the fruit stalls, which were receiving truckloads of fruit delivery at 9PM.

Plastic tables and chairs line the road ready for hotel-based out of towners, as hotels don't allow durian inside their premises. The vendors carefully choose the ripe ones, break open the fruit for customers, and hand out plastic bags. You insert the plastic bags over your hands to handle the pulp, if you don't want to be prevented entry by the hotel security guards.

First lesson: there are many varieties of durian. The varieties are distinguished by size, the shape of the fruit, the length and sharpness of the spines, down to the color of the pulp and thickness of the sections, and the pulp-to-seed ratio. And of course eventually, the smell and taste.

And there, to my chagrin, I realized that everybody was right. That what I had previously tasted was an inferior fruit. On my first night alone in Davao, I had sampled three varieties (Cob, Yellow Cob, Arancillo) and they were all, ambrosially, sweet.

Sweeter than langka (jackfruit), but with the same pungency, though durian pulp is soft as moist cotton, the fibers fine and smooth.

The next day we were able to sample the Puyat and Lacson varieties, and they were also very sweet. That pungent flavor actually is addicting, and now I can understand why people wax crazy about this fruit.

During conversations with the locals, I found out that their preferred variety is the native one, which was the variety used in our durian float, and is not very sweet, with a very small pulp-to-seed ratio.

My companions went crazy and wanted to try the native variety.

I don't know what happened to me. But I wanted to taste that variety, too. We almost missed our flight back to Manila because we first scoured the city for the native variety, an hour before our flight schedule.

We didn't have any luck, and had to check in (we were the very last) for our flight.

Now I'm always on the alert for any trip back to Davao, and constantly checking promo fares.

Magsaysay Park
Davao City