The Allure of Unripe Fruit

Photo by Joshua Hersh

Zurayk is a professor of Agriculture at American University Beirut. If Mouzawak is the poet of Lebanese produce, Zurayk is its academic dean. He's a founding member of Slow Food Beirut, the author of a book on local food culture, and an avid produce blogger. He told me that as far as he knew, "Nobody has studied this aspect of eating."

Nevertheless, the idea seemed to initiate a fit of self-examination. Over the course of the next several days, in a stream of emails and phone calls, he offered the following six insights:

    1.) Fruits eaten unripe are in some cases a different species from the ones eaten ripe.

    2.) By cultivating the fruit over the entirety of its life cycle, farmers are able to avoid market gluts and sell their product for a longer time, thus making more money. (Ramzi Ghosn, the co-owner and winemaker at Masaya, in the Bekaa Valley, told me that at Masaya there is a "green harvest" in the early spring. They use the unripe grapes to make sour grape molasses, and the remaining grapes acquire greater complexity from the reduced density on the vine.)

    3.) One of the origins of the taste for unripe fruits may be that poor country kids used to steal fruit from farmers. As the fruit ripened, the farmers were on alert, so the kids had to make their moves as early as possible, long before the fruit was ready to eat.

    4.) Birds have a tendency to pick at the fully ripe fruit and so, short of using pesticides, the best way to avoid bringing unsightly fruit to market is to harvest it before it's ready.

    5.) The molasses from unripe grapes is "the secret ingredient of tabbouleh, but don't tell anybody."

    6.) Girls like unripe fruits more than boys.

Well, OK, Professor Zurayk may have veered beyond the textbook a little bit. But then again, what if he's onto something?

An informal poll of Beirut foodies yielded the following unscientific results:

    • Four women who said they love both loz akhdar and jenarik, although in two cases they seemed to like the unripe versions more for their dietetic properties--less sugar than the finished product--than taste. (Many women in Beirut are diet-conscious.)

    • One woman who does not like either. (She'd been living in France for several years.)

    • Three men who like both just fine, although their lack of enthusiasm suggested a kind of default nationalistic pride more than a taste preference.

    • One man--Walid Ataya, the owner and chef of Bread Republic, a creative, contemporary Lebanese-cuisine restaurant in Beirut--who said he enjoyed the almond, but "I don't know about the unripe plum. It's too acidic for my tastes." He also told me that he couldn't think of anyone who cooked with the unripe versions of these fruits or vegetables.

After an exhaustive search of tens of Lebanese foodies and one Internet, I did find a dish--at Çiya, the best restaurant in Istanbul, where Chef Musa Dagdeviren uses the green almond (çağla in Turkish) in a dish with lamb and yogurt. It might even tempt me to try loz akhdar again.

Interested in tasting loz akhdar for yourself? Try this recipe for sweet-and-sour green almonds.

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