Has Anyone Eaten "Feng Li Jiao", aka the Swiss cheese plant fruit?

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Has Anyone Eaten "Feng Li Jiao", aka the Swiss cheese plant fruit?

Post by CEOCambodiaNews »

Has anyone tried this fruit ?
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Pineapple or banana? This freaky fruit is creeping people out
AsiaOne
Aug 23, 2019
Is it a pineapple, banana or some Frankenstein-esque hybrid?

At first glance this mysterious fruit looks more like an unripe ear of corn than something edible.

The long, green monstrosity made waves on Taiwanese social media after a netizen shared a picture of it on Facebook on Aug 21.

According to the sign in the photo, the fruit is a "Feng Li Jiao", which translates to pineapple banana. It is also supposedly "very tasty" and tastes like banana, soursop, pineapple, passionfruit and guava.

While some netizens were intrigued, others were grossed out.

Could this thing that looks like the love-child of a pineapple and a banana really taste like a tropical fruit salad?

It turns out that "Feng Li Jiao" is the fruit of the Swiss cheese plant, also known as Monstera deliciosa, which means "delicious monstrosity". The fruit is native to Mexico, Guatemala, Panama and Costa Rica.

Living up to its name, the Swiss cheese plant is actually pretty tasty — when you take the right precautions.

Unripe Swiss cheese plant fruits are full of oxalic acid. That's the stuff that's used to bleach wood and get rid of rust stains on laundry. Needless to say, ingesting it can severely irritate your throat and skin.

To eat the fruit safely, let it sit a few days for its green hexagonal scales to fall off.
A Swiss cheese plant fruit typically sheds its scales from one end to the other. The white kernels that are revealed are safe to eat.
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frank lee bent
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Re: Has Anyone Eaten "Feng Li Jiao", aka the Swiss cheese plant fruit?

Post by frank lee bent »

We have it in tropical Australia.
The oxalic is kind of unpleasant.
Novelty value only.
I don't know how they arrive at the swiss cheese descriptor.
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Re: Has Anyone Eaten "Feng Li Jiao", aka the Swiss cheese plant fruit?

Post by SternAAlbifrons »

frank lee bent wrote: Sat Aug 24, 2019 3:42 am We have it in tropical Australia.
The oxalic is kind of unpleasant.
Novelty value only.
I don't know how they arrive at the swiss cheese descriptor.
Elephant Ears, I grew up with them.
Fantastic flavor - kind of mixed fruit salad, including the bananna. Sorry that's the best description i can come up with.

However it ripens very slowly from the top - leaving an open fruit sitting on you bench-top for a few days as you eat it progressively. That also means a fruit salad/banana smell and fruit flies hanging about your kitchen.
Also has a bitter small "scale" within the fruit. (oxalic acid??) Not unpleasant to some, it gives a good contrast to the sweet fruit.

(maybe Swiss Cheese comes from the elepant ear leaves - which have large swiss cheese shaped holes)
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Re: Has Anyone Eaten "Feng Li Jiao", aka the Swiss cheese plant fruit?

Post by Username Taken »

A very common house plant in Australia. The plant goes by the name of Fruit Salad Plant.

I've eaten the fruit. It's quite nice and tastes like a lot of different fruits all at the same time, hence the fruit salad. The texture is similar to a Custard Apple.


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Re: Has Anyone Eaten "Feng Li Jiao", aka the Swiss cheese plant fruit?

Post by SternAAlbifrons »

^^
Come to think of it - Monstera deliciosa was the first of many latin, scientific, names that i ever learned.
I must have been five years old.
(chuckle, thanks for the memories)

just a qualifying note on the "Elephant Ears" name - That was just the name our family used. usually when referring to the plant.
We always called the fruit Monstera deliciosa
I did not hear the Fruit Salad Plant name until they became more popular in the 70's.
Swiss Cheese, i only heard in past few years.
Other plants with similar leaves, but without the hole, are more commonly called Elephant Ears.
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