Cupuaçu, my first time tasting the fruit

I was quite excited yesterday when I found my first ever cupuacu delivered from Puerto Rico. It was too late to try it yesterday, so we tasted it today, on November 3, 2020. Thank you Bryan Brunner from Montoso Gardens in Puerto Rico.

The package smelled like a fresh acrylic paint, and my husband thought that I got a spray paint and it exploded inside. The smell was actually not that strong. It could be that the cardboard box just accumulated a lot of it while in the transit. The fruit is large, brown, and velvety with a hard shell. Here it is next to my head.

To open the fruit I dropped it a few times onto the concrete patio. When the shell is cracked it is easy to open the fruit by the removing the shell pieces simply by hands. The inside smell is different, and more fruity but still with a lot of aromas we used to associate with artificial flavorings. Some kind of a mix of pineapple, passion fruit, jack fruit, etc. 

The fruit consists of multiple large segments each containing one large seed.  There are couple of videos posted by fruit geeks stating that the fruit is very sour.  So I was careful when putting the first segment into my mouth.  Maybe I'm more used to sour fruit, but I didn't find it especially sour.  The sourness is mostly present on the fibers' ends that are close to the seeds. 

For the rest of the segments I cut off the flesh with scissors, and collected it into a bowl.  I probably consumed a good quarter of the fruit in the process.

The flesh has incredibly powerful flavors and aromas.  Like every strong flavored fruit you had, all mixed into one. I could taste pineapple, guava, jackfruit, passionfruit... Now combine this with the texture of salmon sashimi! While I'm typing this, my hands still smell chocolaty passionfruit. In this fruit I found 26 segments with seeds. The middle core consisted of hard fibers covered with the most sweet and soft flesh.

I consumed that middle flesh happily, and this revealed the hard fibers that were holding it.

My husband found the fruit very good, interesting and complex, and his first impression was that I gave him a Russian style salted salmon.  Apparently the texture is more important for him that the actual flavors.  He got all of them later too, and says that there are many of them in this fruit.  The fruit was too overwhelming for my son, who is a kind of a purist.  He didn't appreciate that many flavor in one fruit on top of the unexpected texture. More goes to me! I'm going to experiment with the remaining pulp and mix it with dates and water.

Cupuacu seedlings are available at https://www.wildlandsplants.com/shop/p/theobroma-grandiflorum