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Berkeley Bowl
Jan. 8th, 2009 12:40 amYesterday 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.
( and a lot of other awesome unusual foods )
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.
( and a lot of other awesome unusual foods )
