Best Fruit Poll.

xp red and white mulberries have a mild taste that's closer to figs than to blackberries.
black mulberries are more comparable to blackberries but blackberries are bolder overall (and yes, more tart)

much love for crisp little currants that burst between your teeth all puckery sour and sweet! ain't had any since i was a small thieving child swiping them from a neighbor's yard. come to think if it, wtf, i'm an adult, i can probably source my own currants now, what am i even doing with my life?

voted cherries of course: many are bad but you can still fairly often find transcendently magnificent specimens of a season. gorgeous black cherries, their firm flesh yielding spurts of sweet crimson nectar, oooooh. and the bright tart ones are incomparable in pie/crepes/pistachio cardamom cakes.

respect to figs as well, since (1) they eat wasps and (2) they're a yummy little bag of crunchy seeds (and digested wasp)

I've never had a mulberry, but blackberries are awesome.

My family had a currant bush when I was growing up. Currants are incredible, they are both sweet and tart, they are very firm berries and are perfectly astringent

As far as savory entries go, olives are also a fruit! They are a huge part of my life - in olive oil, as an appetizer, as an ingredient in many dishes, on pizza, in martinis, in salads, etc. etc.

lol I absolutely grew up with the grapefruit halves and the little grapefruit spoons. I still like grapefruit but typically find it too much hassle. (if I do have grapefruit now, I like it broiled with caramelized sugar on top, that's pretty good. but a treat, obviously.)

I feel like my ultimate answer is going to be apple. I mostly specifically like a few varieties, granny smiths and honeycrisps, anything on the crisper/tarter side. But there's nothing on this list I don't like — the melon family took me a while, but I came around. Fresh ripe pineapple is amazing, same with mango. Some of these I mostly encounter as cocktail ingredients, where they're crucial. But for go-to versatility and utility, I think the apple is kinda hard to beat. Delicious raw, baked, juiced, stewed, sauced. Indispensable.

I ended up going with tomato. Amazing on its own (summer cherry tomatoes in a bowl is the best snack food ever), in a sauce (duh), gazpacho, on a sando with mayo and soft white bread if you're in the south or any other sandwich ever, in a salad (caprese omg), and as an added bonus it's the default item to throw to terrible stage performers in cartoons

I have 2 paw paw trees. They’re too young to fruit but are they any good? I didn’t get them specifically for the fruit but the description sounded like something I’d want to put in a fruit smoothie.

They are so good. Obvious truism already expressed itt: they're gonna taste like the stars coming straight from your tree vs. the grocery store (generally speaking). I've got a couple trees at my place and springs are made significantly better by them

Also I do no gardening at all besides mow the lawn but they just grow year after year, seemingly more each time, so yeah, nice and easy fruit in your hand

Went with grape as it’s one of the easiest on my acid reflux.

hey Dan, if the S. family bush was in 80's new jersey then maybe i have thieved from you! sorry :/ my larcenous days are well behind me now, i promise. i spent this past summer next to a yard filled with raspberry bushes all ripening to rot and i stole exactly zero berries. some might even call me a hero of self restraint.

this thread has me seriously fiending for good fruit rn. all i've got in is green apples and a wodge of freezerberries -- mediocre!!! would love the fruit fairy to gift me some cape gooseberries as i sleep. like big gold currants, tart and sticky-skinned and full of seeds. how i do love a seedy fruit.

melons, though. i haven't yet learned to love melons. maybe i just haven't met the right melon yet? watermelons are okay, othermelons often seem mucousy to me, with mild flavor that cannot begin to justify their slimy texture.

The slime is part of the charm

Like with Jeremy Irons

Few better experiences in life than eating a cold, ripe nectarine straight from the fridge on a hot summer day. Over the sink of course, as the juices drip down your chin...

Thought while reading the list, were has all the carob gone? As a gen x child of hippies, I ate a lot of carob instead of chocolate, don't think I've seen any this century.

― John Backflip (Camaraderie at Arms Length)

I love carob - I never saw it marketed as a health food when I was a kid so to me it was just another type of chocolate. I particularly carob-dipped dried apricots, and I have a carob & rice crispie fudge recipe that’s really good. Whenever I go back to New Zealand, I gorge on a longstanding brand of carob covered apricot muesli bars.

Best fruit in this poll: passion fruit
Best fruit tied with passsionfruit: mangosteen

I used to love stone fruits and berries but they’re not as good in the US, particularly raspberries and blackberries, they have no real flavor.

Oh shit I forgot about tamarillos/tree tomatoes. I haven’t had them in 35 years (I’ve never seen them anywhere except for the vines we had growing in our yard) but they’re amazing, especially with a little sugar sprinkled on them.

i'd never heard of tamarillos! what a beautiful fruit 😍

https://plantinstructions.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/tamarillos.jpg

Don't like most fruit and almost never eat it. Not my thing. Tomatoes.

it's really annoying that during the summer months, just having a few bananas in your kitchen is enough to create a viable ecosystem for a massive swarm of fruit flies. voted tomatoes.

I’ve had tomatoes on the ledge for a week or two and when I cut into one today: sprouted seeds :-///

I've never tried mangosteen, never even see one as far as I know

they don't keep well, if they start to go yellow inside then forget it.

is mandarin a stand-in for tangerine in the poll? They're not the same in my mind

The farmer's market late summer peach i had this morning was the best piece of fruit i've had all year. Just sweet drippy and sublime

Went with mango because it's the cadillac of fruits.. but I have a serious soft spot for grapes, as they grow wild throughout California (both native and wine grape escapees) and it's a real joy to be wandering along the railroad tracks somewhere and discover a vine with ripe, dark bunches and be spitting seeds as you continue your walk

Anyway I have a bunch of grapes tattooed on my shoulder blade but no mango tattoo

is mandarin a stand-in for tangerine in the poll? They're not the same in my mind

I would've immediately said strawberry until recently -- I haven't been able to pick a good carton in a while, and some of my cooling ardor is also probably because of trying to use them in baking.

But I've really gotten into mangos, and picking them has gotten easier for me. I used to be diligent about looking for the sap trails on their stems, but I think a lack of them doesn't mean they're necessarily unsweet.

<3 apricots, dried and fresh (although I usually eat them as pluots), and I've really enjoyed it in jams.

Passion fruit are really aromatic, but they have this weird umami, almost meaty taste sometimes (at least the ones that I've picked out).

Muscadine

― Heez, Sunday, September 29, 2024 5:45 PM (yesterday)

I think this would win if every fruitloving ilxor had tasted them, but alas.

tough choice between mango and pineapple for me, went with the latter because it has the sharp edge in addition to the sweetness

pineapples are kick-ass to be sure, and really good on shish-kabobs

pineapples also look really cool

blew my mind to see them growing in a field, had assumed they grew on trees.

I bought some TJ's dried pineapple recently and ate way too many rings too quickly and my stomach was killing me, pure acid

I bought a bag of green grapes yesterday that are huge and absolutely some of the best grapes I've ever had in my life. Crunch just one with your teeth and your knees will buckle.

i am addicted to sugar, so i usually just gravitate to the sweetest thing around. pineapple it is.

I’ve been growing a pineapple plant but I accidentally beheaded it a couple weeks ago :/

Mango has a soapy-ness to me that I don’t really like but it’s possible I’ve just never had good mango.

re: mangoes, I have to say I alluded to this upthread, but after I read this wonderful article I shared it and the author got in touch, and although he didn't end up putting the mangoes in my hand I did learn the process from him and so earlier this year a friend and I went halves on an order. it was expensive but I had to know. even the smell alone was otherworldly as we drove home from the cargo bay. the actual taste of them -- simply a lifetime peak eating experience, unbelievable. I ended up driving around town giving some to friends, they make you want to share their ecstasy, these mangoes. however in voting I have to take into account what I'm actually going to eat regularly as fruit rather than taste just a few times in my life.

We usually have a period (August, it's already over) where gigantic mangoes can be had at the local grocery for $10/10, so I usually buy boatloads during that time. I've gotten much better at slicing them up, I would say a big-ass mango constitutes a full meal and a good one at that

Pakistani mango season reaches London, and all the Asian shops pile the boxes high.

a native Hawaiian showed me a rad trick: slice the mango thinly, then marinate in soy sauce in the fridge for a half-hour or so, it's pretty darn good

i love hearing about fruit mystical experiences. i can't think of another food that inspires quite the same...

ooh yeah that's like the watermelon/salt/chili powder thing

xp!

When I was a kid we used to love going into the woods and picking wild elderberries, eating them by the handfuls. I don't know how many people here have tried them. They are only a little sweet, but have a deep earthy flavor. They grow throughout the northeast in semi-shaded areas.

After we picked them my mom would make elderberry pancakes for us.

Hey cat, I didn't live in New Jersey but in Western NY! We were happy to share everything with our neighbors. My father grew so much stuff that we ended up giving lots of everything away

https://www.ediblewildfood.com/images/thimbleberry-pictures/rubus-parviflorus-berries.jpg

Thimbleberry was a cool find when I was a kid in the forests of Northern California... you never saw very many so it was always a treat to discover a fat red ripe one

https://www.juneauempire.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/31742971_web1_berry-picking-Vivian-.jpg

Ditto for the lowly salmonberry! Like a giant fat blackberry but bright orange, they grow all over the coastal northwest rain forests

The cool thing about fresh mangoes: you can eat them with the skin. Try it if you get the chance.
One shop here sells some mini-mangoes from Colombia. They're stupidly expensive, pale yellow, thin-skinned, you could grab 2-3 in your hand, and they're frankly amazing.
Some of the best mangoes I ever had were sold to me by a grandmother in a village in Andalusia. Otherworldly as others have said. I voted mango.

I've forgotten how good raspberries are, since they're on the pricier side. They're so light but creamy, with a punch of flavor.

in the order if which i would eat them if they were all in front of me and a perfect 10/10 version of each specemin:

1 - Grapefruit - pink, i eat about two a day, sometimes three in the summer when my grapefruit tree is producing like crazy. i feel so good after eating one, always calms my stomach.
2 - Mango - a good mango, fun to eat and sweeter than candy (others otm about dried mango too)
3 - Honeydew - might be the hardest fruit to find a 10/10 version of, but when you get one it's hard to beat
4 - Cherry - mt rainer or the super deep red ones are the best, super fun to eat too
5 - Peach - i could go nectarine as well but peach barely gets the nod due to it being easier to eat (the fruit doesnt stick to the seed)