While we believe in buying local and buying in season, we sometimes allow a splurge on an exotic unknown from another part of the world. This week, it was the ugli fruit we saw at Whole Foods. Here are our impressions of this big citrus fruit from Jamaica...
We had heard of the ugli fruit (sometimes known by one grower's name for it - uniq) but had never tried one. Their bright orange skins and fat teardrop shapes were very appealing, so we picked just one up (at $2.99 each they were an investment!).
The ugli fruit was found growing wild in Jamaica, and it is believed to be a hybrid of grapefruit and tangerine, and perhaps pomelo. It is indeed a rather ugly fruit - mostly green and wrinkled until it is fully ripe, when it turns orange like ours.
It's available from December through April, and sometimes in the fall.
We cut it open and found two heart-shaped halves with enormous segment of citrus inside.
The peel is very thick and soft and peels away easily. It almost falls away from the juicy segments.
The segments tasted almost exactly like ripe navel orange, sweet and juicy.
The skin around the segments is a little thick for our taste, though - almost unpleasantly papery.
If these grew in our backyard (in Jamaica!) we would gladly eat them. But frankly, we would prefer oranges from Florida over these at this point, especially at $2.99 each.
(Images: Faith Hopler)
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Maybe you're supposed to eat it like a pomelo-- without the skin around the segments.
I am from Jamaica and we use the ugly fruit mainly as a drink, like you would make lemonade. I am happy to see whole foods carrying one of our produce. Faith if ever you decide to visit our beautiful island I hope you will experience a drink made from the ugly fruit. I am sure there are other recipes using this fruit.
The had a marmalade made out of the rind of this thing in cooking light, except that they prefer to call it uniq fruit. I like the ugli name, it makes me thing of the ugliripe tomatoes that the people in florida didn't want to sell outside of the state as they found them an embarrassment, despite their better taste...priorities.
I'm not sure if this link will work for non-subscribers.
http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1696582
Best to remove the skin from the segments, definitely. And I also see these marketed, in the spring, as 'uniq fruit' sometimes. Or as 'ugli fruit'. They're tasty any way they're labelled, and I'm interested to try a lemonade-like drink of them.
A huge plus I've not seen mentioned -- NO seeds!! I only paid 97 cents at Wal-Mart for my fruit, which bore the label "Ugli" as in above photos, but on the sales receipt was identified as "Uniq." I didn't cut mine into halves but peeled it with my hands quite easily. It did taste like an orange but without the strong citrus "bite," and my 21 year old son stole half of it as I peeled it. Big vote of approval there! Lot of fruit for one Ugli/Uniq, and I agree that these must be easy to use for juice.
My local grocer talked me into getting one of these instead of a grapefruit. They were priced the same ($1.49). I cut it and ate it like a grapefruit -- awesome!
Correction: $1.29.
our wallmart called it a "rare fruits" with like 2 other friuts