LIFE

Dragonfruit roaring across southeast asia

B Magazine, Normita Thongtham, Published on 25/11/2012

» The first dragonfruit I ever tasted came from Vietnam, brought by a Thai friend who had an import-export business there. I thought it was strange that I was eating the fruit of a cactus; until then the only cactus I knew of with an edible fruit was the prickly pear in the genus Opuntia, which I've never tasted. The dragonfruit _ Hylocereus undatus, and christened kaew mangkorn in Thai _ was much bigger, and I marvelled at its bright pinkish-red skin with green-tipped scales, and white flesh dotted by tiny edible sesame-like seeds. Eating it chilled, I couldn't quite pinpoint what it tasted like; it had a flavour all its own, which was refreshing. It was in the mid-1990s, and I remember saving some of the seeds, which readily germinated.