Thursday, April 10, 2008

Breast Milk

I bet many of you do not know this fruit. This is the star apples (aka Breast Milk fruits) or fruits from the golden leaf tree (Chrysophyllum Cainito,) which is one of the relatively minor fruits of the family Sapotaceae. The star apple tree is erect, 25 to 100 ft (8-30 m) tall, with a short trunk to 3 ft (1 m) thick, and a dense, broad crown, brown-hairy small branches, and white, gummy latex. The leaves of this tree are very distinctive: slightly leathery, rich green and glossy on the upper surface, coated with silky, golden-brown pubescence beneath when mature, though silvery when young. These two fruits are from Tog 's tree in Coral Gables. In Miami, these trees are planted at various locations for their ornamental value, but very few will fruit.

This is the first time I've eaten these fruits after about 40 years. I've lost the acquired taste of them and they tasted kind of yucky! After consuming these two fellows. I did some Googling and discovered after the fact that: Star apples must not be bitten into. The skin and rind (constituting approximately 33% of the total volume) are inedible. When opening a star apple, one should not allow any of the bitter latex of the skin to contact the edible flesh. I am not sure what I ate but I think I'm OK.

Breast Milk Fruit

2 comments:

Ann (MobayDP) said...

We have this fruit here in abundance and I lOVE it! :)
We usually cut it the other way though, to reveal the star in teh centre. We have the purple star apple and the green star apple.

Lan said...

Yes, indeed, you do have many tropical fruits in Jamaica. Do you have mangosteens? That fruit is delicious. If you cut the star apples in the other direction, you have to work around the seeds as they will be in the way, right? I vaguely remember this fact.