A 'taste of summer.'

I was talking with our friend Dan once and made the comment that to me, the taste of summer was raspberries. I was remembering eating them right out of the patch at my friend Bill's house and getting yelled at by his mom when she discovered her year's supply of jam disappearing before her eyes. 

Dan replied that his taste of summer was passion fruit. 

This conversation took place probably two years ago and at the time, passion fruit was something we knew almost nothing about. 

Now, we have our very own vine, compliments of Jeanne's foresight (and green thumb) and they are starting to ripen. Our vine probably has about 45 fruits on it and I think they will disappear all too quickly. 

Dan tells me that a vine will bear for about three years and then die off. Jeanne has another vine already started so we should be in good shape for some years to come. 

Here are some photos of this unique fruit. 

When they start to turn purple start watching. They'll drop when they are ripe.

The wrinkled one is fully ripe and as sweet as they get, which is not too sweet. They remain fairly tart. 

We had a torrential downpour the other day and one of the more exposed fruits, the green one here, was knocked off by the wind before it was ready. I wondered if it would turn purple but see, it is wrinkling without changing color. Now we'll have to taste test it to see how it compares to the purple one. I love scientific research!

 Do you notice the lines on a couple of them? If you lightly scratch them when they are green, the mature fruit will have the lines on them. Smiley faces and so on. The skins are quite leathery and dry feeling. They do smell slightly of the fruit inside.

Here are the two wrinkled ones. Note that I must have cut the purple one first since there are traces of purple showing on one side of the green one. The purple was definetely sweeter than the green. The purple one was slightly tougher than the green to cut through.  

When I heft one in my hand, it never seems as heavy as it ought to be. I think that is because the seeds inside are very thin shelled and light. There also seems to be an air space inside the seed chamber. Finally, that white part seems to be spongy.

I bit into one right off the vine yesterday, just to see how hard it is to bite through them. The answer is not hard at all.
I also love how colorful they are. 

It is a somewhat odd consistancy. The black seeds are crunchy and easily eaten. Passion fruit without the seeds just wouldn't be the same.

There is not much in each little egg shaped fruit really. I wish we had many vines.

Here is Jeanne's breakfast the other day. Pancakes with whipped cream, apricots and a dollop of passion fruit. Very exotic to us Yooopers. 

Here is a description I found.

Fruit: The nearly round or ovoid fruit, 1-1/2 to 3 inches wide, has a tough rind that is smooth and waxy and ranging in hue from dark purple with faint, fine white specks, to light yellow or pumpkin-color. Within is a cavity more or less filled with an aromatic mass of double walled, membranous sacs containing orange-colored, pulpy juice and as many as 250 small, hard, dark brown or black, pitted seeds. The unique flavor is appealing, musky, guava-like and sweet/tart to tart. The yellow form has generally larger fruit than the purple, but the pulp of the purple is less acid, richer in aroma and flavor, and has a higher proportion of juice (35-38%).

The bottom line is that passion fruit, while cool and exotic, will never replace raspberries as my taste of summer. Next in line for me after raspberries after all, are chokecherries. -djf