Alright.. This post is dedicated to one of my favourite fruits, the lychee.
In the spirit of The Greater Pacific Northwest Durian Challenge.

My first introduction to the lychee flavour was just a few years back, on a day trip to Seattle with my sister. We were there for the Chinese New Year Celebration, and while we were there, we stopped at the Giant Uwajimaya supermarket.

Giant in comparison to the Uwajimaya closest to where I live now, which is still huge in comparison to most grocery stores.

Anyways, so we went there, and me, not being familiar with much in the way of Asian foods, drinks, produce or.. well, anything, I went straight for the beverage section. I’m addicted to beverages, what  can I say? Whenever I’m in a different city, I stop at a grocery store and a convenience store, and check to see if there are any beverages that I haven’t tried before. I’ve even dneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.comriven half a state away, just to buy an Afri-cola, and a Nesbitt’s Orange soda.

So I’m looking through this refrigerator case full of stuff I’ve never had before. So, of course I get two of everything that looks drinkable. I stay away from anything that looks milk based, since we had a long drive home still. I end up with a ton of Ramune soda, one flavour in particular. The Lychee flavour.

Of course I didn’t know it was lychee flavour at first, I had to do some investigating.

See, I don’t pretend to know much about anything Asian. I grew up in a rural farming community. Major exports from our town- milk, and chicken manure. As a kid,  the closest thing I experienced that was even close to “culture shock” was eating at the mongolian grill booth at the county fair.

I’ve never much been into anime, just because I don’t have a long enough attention span to really watch them. Same goes for most movies and TV shows though. Nothing against Anime in particular.

So all I really had to go on for what flavour this soda was, was the cute little drawing of the fruit on the side of the bottle. A cute little bumpy  acorn shaped fruit, with a smiley face, of course.

In fact, my quest for flavour discovery actually lead me to my first introduction to the durian flavour.

It was a package of flavoured marshmallows. There was a cartoon drawing of a cute little bumpy acorn shaped fruit on the package of marshmallows, too. I bought them. of course, upon further investigation- (i.e. placing them in my mouth and chewing) I discovered that the flavour was something all together different. There was no way they could be the same, and infact, they were quite different. (though a cartoon durian is very similar to a cartoon lychee, in my opinion)

Anyways, I finally figured it out after investigating ramune soda available flavours, and narrowing it down through google image search for label photos. (Its actually pretty funny, because there are some labels that clearly say LYCHEE in english on the side, but apparently I didn’t buy those bottles)

It would be a quite a while before I encountered an actual lychee fruit, however-

I’ve had lychee fruit a few times now, since that first encounter. Unfortunately, because lychee fruit aren’t native to where I live, they’re all imported, and the quality varies, as does the import season.

The fruit posted here is not quite fully ripened. Its the best I can find though, as I’d rather have less ripe than overripe. It tastes fairly close to fully ripened lychee, but only a little less soft.

The shell of the fruit is kind of leathery, and you’ve got to cut through it with a sharp knife. It helps to cut the top off and then peel off the shell, but for photographic purposes, I chose to do it differently. also, you can pluck the seed out this way, and its a lot less messy.

The actual flesh of the lychee ranges from white to a soft pink, depending on what variety of lychee you’re eating. This one is more white than pink, and the dark spots you’re seeing are part of the inner lining surrounding the seed. I don’t know if you’re supposed to remove that lining before eating the fruit, but I always do, because its hard and not very fun to chew.

As you can see, the rest of the fruit is soft and juicy.


Its hard to describe the actual flavour of a lychee. Its just GOOD. Slightly citrusy, with a bit of grape and rose thrown in there. Its sweet, not sugary. Its not tart at all, nor is it sour.

The texture is pretty close to that of a grape, a bit of a thin skin on the outside holding tightly to all the juicy goodness on the inside. Biting into it there is a slight crunch, followed by a lot of juice pouring out of the flesh.

Because Lychee fruit are not common around here at all, its not very cost effictive to buy them fresh and expect to be able to make much with them. The fruit themselves are about the same size as a small apricot, if not a bit smaller at times. As you see in the photo above, the center of the fruit is a large seed, which is poisonous (don’t eat it) so really, there is very little fruit on the whole thing.

So when I set out to try my lychee experiments, in addition to the actual fruits, I bought lychee juice to suppliment.



So for the first experiment, I made lychee juice and puree popsicles.

They’re small, the size of a shot glass, but really tasty.

I also made a lychee and lime martini. VERY good.

Hopefully this weekend I’ll be able to post photos of more lychee experiments.

Amongst other things, three desserts are planned. Cupcakes, Jello, and a tart.  Other fruits in the mix- Strawberry, Cherry and Tuscan Melon.

Keep an eye out!

To make two servings, you’ll need-

4 measures white rum (if you prefer, you can use vodka, both variations were pretty tasty)
2 measures triple sec
1 tablespoon lime juice
1 tablespoon agave nectar
4-6 measures lychee juice

Shake with ice, pour into chilled martini glasses, garnish with slice of lime, marachino cherry, and drop the fruit of one lychee into the drink.

Enjoy!

If you want to enjoy something similar without being alcoholic
you might try the lychee and lime spritzer-

1 cup lychee juice
2 tablespoons lime juice
2 cups lemon lime soda

Stir to mix, and serve over ice.

Also, you can see in the first photo, I made some mini lychee juice pops, by freezing lychee juice in disposable shot glasses. Just put some tape over the open end, and stick a toothpick 3/4 of the way into the juice, freeze, making sure the pops are level, and in within about 6 hours, you’ve got a delicious frozen treat!

Enjoy!

-A.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 2:17 am and is filed under June 2007. 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.