10) The Great Custard Apple Experiment

So you may recall the Groovy New Age Herbal Lady (who scolded me for taking a photo of her custard apples) responded to our inquiry about the taste of the curious things with the insightful "like apples - with custard!"

This seemed a tad unlikely to me for an item also known as "bullock's heart or bull's heart", so being a good empiricist (ha!) I decided a test was required.

So I purchased the offended fruit: (the one on the upper right - the others will just have to remain souless...) [FYI - Custard Apples are a sub-tropical deciduous tree belonging to the Annonaceae family. This family contains over 2000 members spread throughout the world. Of this family, it is the atemeoya, a hybrid of the Annona genus, that Australia's commercial cultivars derive from. http://www.custardapple.com.au/info.php




I then bought a quite good Pink
Lady apple and began the testing.







First, you have to realize that de-seeding a custard apple is an art form in itself. You either use a potato masher or a blender ("for a 2 sec burst"). Since we don't have a blender and the masher seemed to have little effect, I opted to seeding by hand.


Those who are really observant will note that the custard apple is about 40% seeds by volume. Seeding it took about 10 minutes {by way of comparison, the apple took 90 secs to chop... hmmmm).

But then the moment of truth arrived and I plopped on the local version of vanilla custard and lo and behold....