If you don't live in South East Asia like me, then you may have very likely missed one of the most delicious fruits available on trees. It's called the pomela and the first time I saw one in Israel, I thought it was a slightly greenish grapefruit on steriods; a genetically engineering fruit gone amok. Of course, never one to be deterred by chemicals in food, I bought one and took it home.
Once I got it home I left it on the counter for about two weeks and I just looked at it. It seemed like such a freak of nature that I was fixated. It might as well have been a piece of art rather than food.
Finally a friend of my dropped by for some unrelated reason and I asked her what I should do with my pomela. "Well, you could eat it," she said. Yes, yes, I knew that, but the real question was "how".
I think she was surprised by my lack of fruit expertise, but she asked for a knife and made one big cut through the circumference of the pomela. The she turned it about 90 degrees and cut the circumference from that direction as well. Now I had this big grapefruit thing with a north-east slice and an east-west slice.
When she peeled back the skin it was thick and foamy. I mean about an inch and a half thick, maybe two inches.
Now I know that you have to get all the layers of skin off before you can proceed to eat the pomela. It's sort of like removing the epidermis, the dermis and the sub-dermis, and it takes about as long.
When you reach the sub-dermis filmy membrane you have to slowly peel it away from each and every wedge. When I was a kid, we used to call the wedges of oranges, "boats". NO, I don't remember why, but we did.Of course, with an orange, you eat that filmy membrane layer covering the actual citrus flesh. With a pomela, you do not.
The trick is to remove the entire boat wedge in tact. I rarely succeed at this but I don't care because either way, I just want to get to the fruit inside. It tastes like a happy grapefruit; it doesn't have that little edge of bitterness commonly associated with grapefruits which explains my need to eat grapefruit with honey.
A few years ago there was some medical breakthrough news that mentioned the cancer-fighting attributes of pomelas. But when I googled it just now, I couldn't find it so who knows if it is true or not. It doesn't really matter to me. It would just be an added benefit.
What does matter to me is that according to Wikipedia www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomelo it is the largest type of citrus fruit available and somewhere out there, someone has managed to grow one the size of a basketball. Now that is something I want to see.
If it is you and you are reading this now, send me a photo with something else in it for comparison's sake and I will post it on my blog.
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