Berkeley Bowl
Jan. 8th, 2009 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mattbellYesterday I went with a friend to Berkeley Bowl for the first time. Berkeley Bowl is famous for having the broadest selection of produce of any supermarket in the area. It did not let me down. Berkeley Bowl basically stocks a superset of what every other type of supermarket stocks. There's a Rainbow Grocery, a Whole Foods, a Trader Joe's, a Safeway, and a Ranch 99 all contained within its bounty. They're the Amazon of supermarkets... they carry everything, and don't have a particular slant or agenda.
Our expicit goal was to get a huge range of different fruits and vegetables that we've never tried before. I've listed the highlights here.
Horn Melon (Kiwano)
The most interesting thing we got was called the Horned melon (Kiwano). Words cannot fully describe how awesome it is, but I'll try anyway. On the outside, it's a spiked orange ball. However, when you cut it open, you see a dense mesh of hard plant fiber enclosing a matrix of seeds, each of which is floating in a green gelatinous oval sphere. You can just eat the seeds and the green jelly, and they taste fantastic. However, the best part comes when you've already eaten off the top layer of gelatinous seed pods. You squeeze the fruit, and the next layer down of gelatin-enclosed seeds pop through the mesh asynchronously. It's bizzare... I could see a B-gade 50s horror film using a closeup of this process as a stand-in for the birth of some alien embryos. Put another way, imagine if you could get all the seeds out of a pomegranate just by cutting it in half and then gently squeezing. It's kind of like that. Remember how weird the sensation of the tapioca balls was the first time you had bubble tea? This is weirder. This thing gets a 10 for visual presentation, a 10 for novelty factor, a 10 for ease of consumption, and a 10 for taste.
Black (fermented) garlic -
Black garlic is not very garlicky in taste. It's the perfect spread for bread -- it's sweet & sour, pasty in texture, and rich in flavor.
Feijoa - It has all the lovely sweet textured taste of the guava, but with no jawbreaker seeds! You can just eat the whole thing. This is an all-natural dessert that is every bit as sweet as something you'd find in an ice cream shop. I bet I could go to Middle America and hand these things out, and kids would eat them like candy. Normally I don't like super-sweet things, but I think I enjoy its natural sweetness.
Sapote - This fruit was almost as sweet as Feijoa, but had some seeds to navigate around.
Cherimoya - Another creamy, sweet tasting fruit. People who like bubblegum should know that it tastes like bubblegum. People who don't like bubblegum (like me) should know that it tastes like bubblegum, but good. I'm glad I looked at the wikipedia page on this one though. Apparently the skin and seeds are both poisonous. Eating the skin can cause paralysis.
Lotus root - This is commonly seen in soups in Japanese restaurants. it's crunchy like Jicama, light in flavor, and filling. It is mostly hollow in cross section, with an interesting web-like structure. The whole root looks like a chain of sausage links! It gets fat, then thin, then fat, then thin again... I've never seen a plant root that oscillates in size. My only theory as to why this happens is that the roots are underwater instead of underground, the hollowness helps with buoyancy, and the periodic constrictions ensure that there are separate air-filled chambers so that the flooding of one chamber is not catastrophic.
Banana flower - It's a complex multihulled flower/leaf cluster, where every part has a different look and feel. However, 98% of it tastes horribly astringent, just like an unripe banana. This is not surprising at all, given that that's exactly what it is. The all-white 2% in the middle of the flower is reasonably yummy. Each online recipe had a different solution for the astringency, from steaming to soaking in vinegar. We tried the soaking in vinegar part, and found that it did indeed take away the astringency. However, with the astringency gone, they just tasted like vinegar. It was definitely more fun to dissect than to eat.
Star fruit - This was tasty, crunchy, as watery as a watermelon, and tart. They require a little effort to cut up, but they're delicious.
Fragrant pear - Like the name suggests, a very sumptuous and delicious pear.
Huaje beans - Apparently these are seedpods from an acacia tree. The beans were a pain to extract from their long flat seed-pods, but they were rich and earthy in taste.
Pepino fruit - a white fruit that tastes like a cross between a cucumber and a not-completely-ripe honeydew melon, with the almost-gooey texture of a very ripe melon. A++ Fruit. Would eat again.
Garlic chives - I presume these are the shoots of young garlic plants. They have the taste of mild garlic with chive texture. They were fantastic when mixed in raw with quinoa and beans.
White turmeric - Apparently can be eaten raw. Spicy favor, weird aftertaste.
Young ginger - Like regular ginger, but milder and with more of the texture of an apple
Hawaiian plantain - May have not been totally ripe, but it was blander and crunchier than a regular plantain. Not too impressive.
Nopales (paddle cactus) - I was expecting something exotic, but sadly the taste was very similar to green bell pepper.
Chayote Squash - Very boring and bland. It's one of those things you add to a dish for texture and mass, like potato. It soaks up the flavor of whatever you cook it with.
Our expicit goal was to get a huge range of different fruits and vegetables that we've never tried before. I've listed the highlights here.
Horn Melon (Kiwano)
The most interesting thing we got was called the Horned melon (Kiwano). Words cannot fully describe how awesome it is, but I'll try anyway. On the outside, it's a spiked orange ball. However, when you cut it open, you see a dense mesh of hard plant fiber enclosing a matrix of seeds, each of which is floating in a green gelatinous oval sphere. You can just eat the seeds and the green jelly, and they taste fantastic. However, the best part comes when you've already eaten off the top layer of gelatinous seed pods. You squeeze the fruit, and the next layer down of gelatin-enclosed seeds pop through the mesh asynchronously. It's bizzare... I could see a B-gade 50s horror film using a closeup of this process as a stand-in for the birth of some alien embryos. Put another way, imagine if you could get all the seeds out of a pomegranate just by cutting it in half and then gently squeezing. It's kind of like that. Remember how weird the sensation of the tapioca balls was the first time you had bubble tea? This is weirder. This thing gets a 10 for visual presentation, a 10 for novelty factor, a 10 for ease of consumption, and a 10 for taste.
Black (fermented) garlic -
Black garlic is not very garlicky in taste. It's the perfect spread for bread -- it's sweet & sour, pasty in texture, and rich in flavor.
Feijoa - It has all the lovely sweet textured taste of the guava, but with no jawbreaker seeds! You can just eat the whole thing. This is an all-natural dessert that is every bit as sweet as something you'd find in an ice cream shop. I bet I could go to Middle America and hand these things out, and kids would eat them like candy. Normally I don't like super-sweet things, but I think I enjoy its natural sweetness.
Sapote - This fruit was almost as sweet as Feijoa, but had some seeds to navigate around.
Cherimoya - Another creamy, sweet tasting fruit. People who like bubblegum should know that it tastes like bubblegum. People who don't like bubblegum (like me) should know that it tastes like bubblegum, but good. I'm glad I looked at the wikipedia page on this one though. Apparently the skin and seeds are both poisonous. Eating the skin can cause paralysis.
Lotus root - This is commonly seen in soups in Japanese restaurants. it's crunchy like Jicama, light in flavor, and filling. It is mostly hollow in cross section, with an interesting web-like structure. The whole root looks like a chain of sausage links! It gets fat, then thin, then fat, then thin again... I've never seen a plant root that oscillates in size. My only theory as to why this happens is that the roots are underwater instead of underground, the hollowness helps with buoyancy, and the periodic constrictions ensure that there are separate air-filled chambers so that the flooding of one chamber is not catastrophic.
Banana flower - It's a complex multihulled flower/leaf cluster, where every part has a different look and feel. However, 98% of it tastes horribly astringent, just like an unripe banana. This is not surprising at all, given that that's exactly what it is. The all-white 2% in the middle of the flower is reasonably yummy. Each online recipe had a different solution for the astringency, from steaming to soaking in vinegar. We tried the soaking in vinegar part, and found that it did indeed take away the astringency. However, with the astringency gone, they just tasted like vinegar. It was definitely more fun to dissect than to eat.
Star fruit - This was tasty, crunchy, as watery as a watermelon, and tart. They require a little effort to cut up, but they're delicious.
Fragrant pear - Like the name suggests, a very sumptuous and delicious pear.
Huaje beans - Apparently these are seedpods from an acacia tree. The beans were a pain to extract from their long flat seed-pods, but they were rich and earthy in taste.
Pepino fruit - a white fruit that tastes like a cross between a cucumber and a not-completely-ripe honeydew melon, with the almost-gooey texture of a very ripe melon. A++ Fruit. Would eat again.
Garlic chives - I presume these are the shoots of young garlic plants. They have the taste of mild garlic with chive texture. They were fantastic when mixed in raw with quinoa and beans.
White turmeric - Apparently can be eaten raw. Spicy favor, weird aftertaste.
Young ginger - Like regular ginger, but milder and with more of the texture of an apple
Hawaiian plantain - May have not been totally ripe, but it was blander and crunchier than a regular plantain. Not too impressive.
Nopales (paddle cactus) - I was expecting something exotic, but sadly the taste was very similar to green bell pepper.
Chayote Squash - Very boring and bland. It's one of those things you add to a dish for texture and mass, like potato. It soaks up the flavor of whatever you cook it with.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-08 05:09 pm (UTC)The black garlic is very intriguing, as is the feijoa.
Off-topic
Date: 2009-01-08 11:04 pm (UTC)Also, I love Rainbow Grocery! I've only ever been to the one in San Francisco.
Re: Off-topic
Date: 2009-01-09 12:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-09 06:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-09 06:39 am (UTC)