The food, oh the food!!

I've signed up for a one morning cooking class that will be Tuesday morning. Any westerners reading this will be sleeping, or watching football, Monday night while I'm learning and cooking Tuesday morning. 

Beside the uncommon meats I've already posted about I've eaten lots of other more conventional food here in Vietnam. I've been trying to decide how to write about the food without creating a single giant post. I haven't really figured out what this will be like over the next several food posts. For starters though here's my impression of the fresh fruits.

First, WOW, I can't imagine there being any better variety or flavor and texture choices. I wrote about durian that I tasted fresh for the first time ever on my first night here. Beside the durian there are other fruits with familiar and unfamiliar names. For the unfamiliar names I will get them and put them in the photo captions. 

There are fruits common to US supermarkets like watermelon, grapes, oranges, limes, pineapple, mango and grapefruit. I'm sure I'm forgetting some. For the most part the watermelon, grapes, oranges and limes haven't seemed different. The pineapple, mango and grapefruit are definitely more succulent.

Then there are the fruit that are not found or extremely uncommon in the US market. This includes a number of them that I've only heard and then forgotten the Vietnamese name. Tastes and textures run a gamut from soft to firm, no fiber to fibrous, moist to "turn off the faucet!" and small seeds to large pits.

dragon fruit

 Dragon fruit meat is soft and a bit grainy with no fibers and visible but not tasted or felt seeds and a very mildly sweet flavor. The skin looks nasty but can be cut easily and easily separates from the meat. There are red and white, đỏ & trắng, meat varieties. White is more common. Red is supposedly "better" and so is more expensive. I've had both and prefer the white. It's meat is a bit firmer and there is less juice. Apparently the premium for red is based on the color.

red & white (đỏ & trắng) dragon fruit

jack fruit

jack fruit

jack fruit

I mistook jackfruit for muskmelon/cantelope when I first saw it. The first pieces I had where much more orange than these pictures. Each little piece is a seed jacket inside the fruit. A single fruit can be larger than a person's head. It's got a tough bumpy exterior and hundreds of the seed wrappers inside. The most common way I've seen it sold is in packages that contain only the seed wrappers. It is succulent, sweet, moist and firm like a not quite ripe muskmelon. The meat isn't fibrous and is textured a bit like a gummy bear without the stickiness.

durian

Durian I've described before.

durian

on left mangosteen, on right rambutan 

mãng cầu, the sweet kind 

mãng cầu, the sweet kind

Other fruits I've tried have all been sweet to MUCH sweeter with larger seeds. I haven't gotten the names down yet so won't name them here but will come back and caption the pictures with names once I get them again and write them down. UPDATE: thanks to anonymous for the info about mangosteen, rambutan and mãng cầu.