RM RAW

Introducing a new category…WTF is this? And how do I eat it? I’m starting this category because, as I find better markets, with better fruit and vegetable selections to shop at, I am seeing some items for the very first time. Usually this would disuade me from buying it, instead hoping to remember what it was called and look it up later at home. Usually I forget, so in the interest of expanding my palette’s horizons, I am just buying the weird things I find, and will be writing about my experiences trying out the new, strange vegetables an fruits. Hopefully this will encourage some of you to also try these lesser known edibles.

Today I’ll be sharing with you my first experience with a Chayote. I found them on sale, 4 for $1.99. Here’s a picture. The one on the left is set upside down so I could show you the funny mouth shaped crease it has. It’s smiling at you!

Chayotes (Sechium edule) are from the gourd family, and while they may look like a pear or an apple are actually considered a vegetable. Before looking this information up, I washed off my chayote and bit into it assuming it would be pear-like, but the taste was more like semi-sweet celery. The texture was like a firm apple or pear though, and it seemed to have a lot of fluid in it. To be honest, my initial reaction wasn’t what I hoped for and it was a bit of a chore to chew and swallow what I had already bitten. So, I put it back in the fridge and decided I should look up just how these things are used before I go and ruin my initial impression of it.

Wikipedia has the following to say on the Chayotes culinary and medicinal uses:

Although most people are familiar only with the fruit, which in culinary terms is a vegetable, the root, stem, seeds, and leaves are all edible.The fruit does not need to be peeled and can be eaten raw in salads. It can also be boiled, stuffed, mashed, baked, fried, or pickled. Both the fruit and the seed are rich in amino acids and vitamin C.The tuberous part of the root is starchy and is both eaten by humans and used as cattle fodder.The leaves and fruit have diuretic, cardiovascular and anti-inflammatory properties, and a tea made from the leaves has been used in the treatment of arteriosclerosis and hypertension, and to dissolve kidney stones. In Taiwan, chayotes are widely planted for its shoot, known as lóng xü cài (Tr. Ch. ???, lit. Dragon-whisker vegetable). Along with the young leaves, the shoot is a commonly consumed vegetable in the region.

(link)

Well, it did taste like celery but with the texture of a firm apple to me, so putting it in a salad would probably work well. Having already had a salad today, I decided instead to try to juice it. A surprising amount of geenish juice came out of this thing, and combined with apple juice and carrot juice, it blended pretty well. On it’s own, the juice of the chayote reminds me of a less severe tasting wheat grass, and that underlying flavor is detectable in the final mix of carrot, chayote, and apple.

My back is sore today, so maybe the juice also has some anti-inflammatory qualities and might help. We’ll see…

Definitely an interesting discovery, but I am not sure how else I will be using the other 3…stay tuned. I bet you could make a good pie with these and spice it up like an apple pie, but I won’t go on about that, or any other possible ways to COOK this vegetable. Mostly I will wait and see if it makes me feel any different, and if it does, then maybe I will buy it for the effect of the juice, but as for the flavor, I enjoy other veggies more than I do the chayote.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 9:02 pm and is filed under WTF is this?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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