Dragon Fruit: Beauty is Only Skin Deep

(#13) Taste 25 Foods I've Never Tasted Before

1. Pattypan Squash
2. Beets
3. Eel
4.Wahoo
5.Lychee
6.Quinoa
7. Raw Oyster
8. Octopus
9. Duck
10. Daikon
11. Authentic French Food

12. Dragon Fruit

Many of you may be familiar with dragon fruit (also called pitaya) as bonus points on "Fruit Ninja." But it actually does exist in real life. And it looks like this:

You can tell this one is ripe because the color is bright and fairly consistent- no blotches. 

Dragon fruit is fairly soft and you can cut it right in half to get to the edible portion inside. If the exotic skin didn't already freak you out, the insides are quite unexpected as well. 

This is a white dragon fruit. Some have red insides. 

To eat it, you can run a spoon along the edges and basically scoop the fruit out whole- like you might with an avocado:

Then you can dice up the edible portion into bite-sized pieces and eat. 

After the dramatically beautiful appearance of the dragon fruit (not to mention the cool name), the taste was kind of a let-down. Because of the edible seeds throughout, you get a soft texture and then a crunch somewhat like a kiwi. But not quite as flavorful as a kiwi. 

And not quite as flavorful as anything, really. Not particularly sweet or sour. The smell reminded me more of a vegetable than a fruit- also bland, somewhat celery-like.

Ronnie didn't want to admit it, but I could tell he was put off by the randomly-placed seeds. Which sort of look like fruit flies that have infested your fruit before you even cut into it. 

Also considering that it cost $6 a pound, I think we'll be sticking with more traditional fruits in the future.