Noni
I was going to just reply in the comments about the Noni but decided it needed a post of its own.
Paul and Kathe are absolutely right, the thing smells horrid! Mimi and I figured out that it smells like very, very ripe blue cheese or maybe Camembert, which is stinkier I believe. It’s just not the smell that you should ever associate with a fruit. It’s so nasty that it stunk up my wine cooler/fruit refrigerator and I’ve got a plate of baking soda in there now hoping to get rid of it.
I had intended to be brave and add it to my morning smoothie – ruining good orange juice as Kathe pointed out – but I just couldn’t do it. I thought first of chucking it all in the trash and then bagging it outside but I remembered you my dear readers. I would feel like a wuss if I didn’t try it and report here – mainly so you don’t have to do it if you should run into one some day. Although, a noni will never sneak up on you in a plate of other fruit, you will smell it coming from across the room.
It has a lot of seeds so you can’t just bite into it, chew fast and swallow. You kind of have to pick around to get the meat. (Oh, bad reference, the smell also has a resemblance to rancid meat.) You have to take a bite and then work the seeds out before you can chew and swallow. I can’t believe I didn’t just spit it out immediately.
So, I did it. I took a bite. It tastes slightly like blue cheese but without the wonderful creamy part and with a dose of alum or something astringent that makes your mouth pucker and that is very, very difficult to get rid of.
It’s friggin’ awful, that’s the short and dirty. It’s rinse your mouth and then go upstairs and brush your teeth immediately awful – that kind of awful. Then double bag the whole lot of them and put them in the garage for the garbage awful. Then put a whole box of baking soda in your refrigerator and stir it often to hope and get rid of the smell – that kind of awful.
The things I do for you internets.
Just to take the taste out of your eyeballs, here’s a pic of Tita sleeping while holding on to a piece of driftwood. Isn’t she sweet? … looking.
...but she looks so sweet when she is sleeping
jonna… i drank a noni drink (1 tablespoon a day) after coming off chemo. It didnt taste bad. It was the color of figs. I drank it for about 1 year. I believe it gave me a lot of energy when I really needed it. Enuf wit da noni… lets play with tita!
oh…. i started a wordpress blog here… still figuring it out… but it is a clean process and probably even cleaner once you know what you are doing!
Hey Hi
My bartender here at the Bull Pen in Chelem was putting “noni” in the blender with OJ to help him loose weight. Jorge drank it for about a week and then I noticed there were a few “fruits” left in the Sol cooler and he wasn’t using them any more. LOL. In the few weeks since he’s lost a few pounds but I doubt it was from the “Noni”.
I was going to try it but decided better as he was making a lot of trips away from the bar. (If you know what I mean.)
So if anyone needs a couple or six of these fruits I’m sure Jorge would gladly donate them. I’ve never taken the time to smell them but your description was good enough for me.
I wondered why Jorge was making those funny faces as he drank his juice!
Hugs to all,
Patrick
Quick Patrick, get those things out of your bar before no one can set foot in the place!! Maybe they don’t ripen if they are cold, I left mine out for a day and they got soft, started turning brown and the smell began to waft. Then I put them in the wine cooler for the night and whew! I still haven’t gotten the smell out.
Rachel, I have a feeling that your noni drink was heavily sweetened and had flavor added (or subtracted). Glad it helped you, I’d have to be really sick to think eating those was a good option.
When I lived in Jamaica, (way way before Cozumel) we had that fruit there as well and the jamaicans called it sour sop, which is more fitting, I think.
Hmmm…Laura, sour sop is the usual English translation for guanabana. A guanabana looks a little like a noni, although the guanabana is much larger and is actually quite delicious.
Maybe there’s a regional difference in naming?
Cristina
Oh what a brave soul you are, a martyr to the cause of blogging! Thanks for the heads up, I’ll be sure to avoid the Noni. “No no Noni!”
And oh gosh Tita looks darling!
I had NEVER heard about Noni(s) but they sound awful and since I consider nopales too gross already (cant stand the “baba” thing), I think I’ll stay clear from nonis. You were very brave to try them!!
Fned.
Hi Jonna: To get the smell out of your cooler put in an open container of coffee ground in it. Use regular coffee not decaf. This really works. When my son was in High School he went camping in the fall and left a cooler in the garage with a pound of hamburger in it. I discovered it in the spring. Whew!!! I have never smelled anything as bad. BUT the coffee trick worked, so give it a try. Leave it for a few days and then check it. If the smell isn’t gone, leave it for a week. I am enjoying your Blogs.
I tend to avoid eating anything purple; even a hint of purple.
June, thanks for commenting. I hear a lot about you from the Dodwell’s. I think I have gotten rid of the smell with the baking soda, so far so good. I’ll remember the tip about coffee though, if it will take the dead meat smell out of a cooler it will do anything. Thanks.
Yeah CC and Fned, brave! I used to say to myself, “how bad can it be, it’s a FRUIT” I don’t think I’ll think that again, I know how bad it can be.
Guanabana is what I also think is called soursop in English. I did a blog on those not long ago, I’ll have to look for it. Noni seems to be Noni in English as well.
Juan, there isn’t much to be called purple on this one. The seeds may be a purplish black but the skin and flesh is what I call Canadian Beige. It looks more like a potato on the outside than anything else. If you avoid purple, then you miss out on mangosteen and plums and pitaya! The worst tasting fruits I’ve found have been beige or light yellow and mild looking on the outside, the Noni and the Nance come immediately to my mind.
I’ve been wondering about noni. Thanks for the experiment. I’ve heard that it smells awful but never saw it explained so vividly. My mother-in-law gave us a bottle of juice that I think she had forgotten about in her fridge for months. (Thanks, mom!) El Jefe took one taste and threw it out. I wasn’t brave enough to try it, it looked that nasty.
Cristina, I could be confused, since it was awhile ago, but we had both sweet sop (yummy) and sour sop (not so yummy) I always thought that guanabana was the sweet sop.
Laura, here’s a link that shows photos of both fruits (just scroll down to the S’s to see them). I’m very curious to know which is the one you ate. Until today, I had never heard of the sweet sop! It’s great to learn something new!
http://www.tntisland.com/fruits.html
Cristina
Laura, what a great link that one was…thank you…
The sour sop is what we definitely call a guanabana in Chetumal and the sweet sop is called Anona in Chetumal (I have several trees on my property) and Custard Apple across the border in Belize.
Whoops…thank you Cristina….
sorry, just seeing this now, kathe is totally right about the fruits. Thanks for the excellent fruit link. Some of those fruits I really miss, for example, the jackfruit wins hands down as the best fruit I’ve ever eaten in my life! Wonder if we can get something similar here? I know we get gnapes…
We have jackfruit here in Yucatan, it’s called Yaca. I have seen it in the stores. I saw it growing over on the west coast, in the state of Colima, and sold alongside the roads there. I imagine it also grows on this side of the country. If not on Cozumel you should be able to get it in Playa.