5 Fruits You May Not Have Heard Of Unless You've Been To South America

On a recent trip to Bogota, Colombia, I took a tour of the Paloquemao Market, the largest market in the city. Bogota's food scene makes it one of our most exciting travel destinations, and this market perfectly highlights the fresh and unique ingredients the local chefs get to play with. Walking in, you immediately see vendors with giant piles of fruits, some familiar-looking and some unknown, grown across the bioculturally diverse country. 

I hired a guide to take me on a tour of the market's many fruit vendors for a day of tasting tropical fruits completely foreign to my American palate. My guide introduced me to types of fruits whose descriptions sounded made up, like a tiny, sweet cucumber, a tomato that grows on trees, and even a familiar-looking citrusy orange fruit with a completely unexpected inner fruit. Among all the fruit I tasted, there are five you may have never heard of if you've never taken your own trip to South America, but they're absolutely worth knowing: lulo, sweet cucumber, tree tomato, granadilla, and Andean blackberry.

Also known as naranjilla, lulo looks like an orange on the outside and a green tomato on the inside. Even though it's in the nightshade family, the same family as tomatoes, the flavor is more similar to an acidic citrus fruit like lime and tangerine, with a taste of rhubarb as well. It's rarely found outside of South America and parts of Central America because the fruit is too delicate to ship. Instead of the whole fruit, specialty vendors outside regions where it's grown will sell frozen pulp or juice.

The skin is too thick to eat, like an orange's exterior. The tartness of the fruit leads to it being used more in sauces, ice creams, and drinks than eaten straight. Its most common preparation is in a refreshing drink called a lulada. Made of lulo, lime, sugar, and ice, it's a popular sweet and tangy drink created in the Cali region of Colombia, but enjoyed throughout the country. If you can find it where you live, it pairs well when cooked with fish — try lulo juice instead of orange juice for an extra zing in our citrus-glazed mahi mahi recipe.

Sporting a yellow or purple skin with white speckles, the sweet cucumber lives up to its name with its cantaloupe crossed with cucumber flavor. Otherwise known as a pepino melon, the fruit comes in many shapes and sizes — some are longer like a cucumber, while some are short and oval-shaped. Although cucumber is in the name, sweet cucumber is part of the nightshade family, so those who are allergic to tomatoes and eggplants may want to avoid these fruits.

Sweet cucumbers go well eaten with some tajin, in a fresh fruit salad, or as a sweet and mild juice. One of our favorite ways to elevate a fruit salad is to use a unique fruit like the sweet cucumber! The entirety of the fruit is edible — the skin and seeds included. They're healthy, too, as they're chock-full of vitamins C and A, plus calcium and iodine. Unlike some tropical fruits, sweet cucumbers ship well, making them easier to find online and occasionally in specialty markets!

Also known as a tamarillo or a tomate de arbol, the tree tomato looks similar to a shiny Roma tomato with its medium size and oval shape. The skin is often darker than most tomatoes, and will sometimes have dark streaks running down the side of the fruit. As its name suggests, it's in the nightshade family and it grows on trees. It was originally cultivated in the Andes and now can be found throughout the region.

When you cut open a tree tomato, you can see some resemblance to a regular tomato — the inside of the fruit is divided into different chambers full of seeds suspended in a glossy mucilage. The bitter skin is commonly peeled off to leave the sweet and tangy flesh. Common uses for the fruit are jams and chutneys, or as a juice with milk added. Any way you consume them is great as they're on our list of 12 superfoods you need to know due to being filled with vitamins A, B, C, and E, along with iron, potassium, and fiber!

Granadilla is the lesser-known member of the passion fruit family, but worth hunting down. It's common in Colombia, where people open it by either creating indents with their thumbs to rip it apart or just breaking it open on their head. The outside of a granadilla looks like an orange with small, white speckles. Once you break it open it's obvious that it's related to passion fruit — the multitude of black seeds are covered in a sweet, white gel-like substance — but the flavor is sweeter than a typical passion fruit.

Since the outer shell is inedible and the interior a mess, you hold the broken open fruit up to your mouth and scoop out the sweet, covered seeds. It's most often eaten raw, as the crunch of the seeds and its sweetness don't need any additions. It can be found in juices paired with tangerines or strawberries, or in cocktails. It makes a good ice cream, as well, as found in an ice cream shop on our list of the 50 best ice cream parlors in the world.

Andean blackberries look like a large mashup of blackberries and raspberries with their dark purple and deep burgundy fusion of color. Native to the Andes, these berries are grown between 1,200 and 3,500 meters above sea level, and are prized for their flavor and health benefits.

The taste of the Andean blackberry is more tart than its North American counterpart, with a flavor akin to a hybrid of blackberry and cranberry. They are often eaten on their own, or mixed into a smoothie or jam with sugar to take the edge off the sourness. You can find frozen concentrates or pulps of the berries either labeled as Andean blackberries or sometimes under the name mora. Some specialty markets will even have the fresh berries. Try substituting regular blackberries with Andean blackberries in a blackberry bramble for a tart, refreshing punch up. Health benefits abound as they are especially high in vitamin C and are a good, natural source of polyphenols, compounds with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.