Apple Bananas

It's a banana, but it taste (a little) like an apple. It's an apple banana:

Not much to say about these. They taste good, but one warning: they are not ripe when they are just yellow. At that stage, they taste ... well ... bad. More like peel or green banana than apple or banana. Wait until they are at least as ripe as this picture, preferably until they are uniformly browner.

Verdict: Glad I tried it, but I probably won't do it again.

Young Coconut

If you like coconut, you'll love young coconut.  A young coconut is that off-white thing that looks like a doll-sized tiki hut with no door or windows:

The green outer husk has already been hacked off by someone with a machete; your job is to take up where he left off and get at the treasure inside.

Make sure you select one that is fresh. If it's undated (they usually aren't dated), try to get one that's white. You'll also need a pretty sturdy knife.  First, hack a roughly circular pattern in the top of the tough, fibrous husk that remains, and peel (i.e., rip) that husk away:

Inside that husk is what would have eventually become the familiar hairy, brown coconut if we hadn't cut its young life short.

Next, hack a hole in the hard shell (the shell that you're used to seeing), and pry open the little lid that you just made:

Yes, it's exactly like brain surgery, and you've just cracked open the skull. [I'll let you draw any further anatomical analogies to skin, hair, dura mater, etc., that you care to.]

Clinging just inside the hard shell is a thin layer of coconut meat and (the best part) hopefully a shell full of liquid.  The liquid would have eventually solidified into coconut meat, but it is now very sweet essence of coconutty goodness:

(Typically, it's much thinner than this one and has the consistency of firm gelatin.)

Now all you need to do is pour the liquid into a glass (don't spill any of it), and as you scoop out the young coconut meat with a spoon, eat pieces with sips of the juice. Yum.

Verdict: I eat these all the time and plan on continuing to do so.

Mangosteens

Purple mangosteen

The purple mangosteen is a fruit from southest Asia.

It's very common to see them in Asian grocery stores. Here are the ups and downs of eating them.

In addition to trying something new — always an up — the one up for me is that when they are fresh, they have an interesting, pleasant flavor. Initially, they're well-balanced sweet and sour, with just a hint of salty. The aftertaste is reminiscent of vanilla.

But the most overwhelming component of the flavor is what I consider to be first of the downs: an unmistakenly strong smell of old, wet sawdust. When these things are fresher than the ones that I've gotten (I've bought two batches that came from different stores and wholesalers, and I noticed that the sawdust smell was stronger in the ones that were obviously less fresh), I'd expect that the sawdust flavor is muted or absent, especially given how people rave over them. But both my batches had that odor, and it put me off.

There are two other downsides. First, mangosteens are expensive in the states. I paid around a dollar something a piece for them.

And second, they're a little hard to open. The shell is about 3/8" thick and made of wet wood (undoubtedly the source of the sawdust flavor), and you must carefully open it with a good sized knife. I put the mangosteen on its side on a dish towel (one you don't like, because the purple stains), place a large knife against the side, pound it in about 1/4" with my hand, then do that around the outside a few times, and pry the thing open. Note the brown stain on the segments in this one that came from the outer shell:

Then just scoop the segments out. You can eat the smaller seeds, but don't try to eat the big one in the middle:

Verdict: Glad I tried it, but I probably won't do it again.