Ode to the gac fruit – glutinous rice dessert

As adventurous as we are…today we probably got one of the oddest fruits ever…the gac fruit, a  vietnamese fruit. It’s supposed to have 10x more carotenoids than carrots! Yay phytonutrients! Well without further ado, this is how it looks like. It’s about the size of a papaya and while it has spikes on the outside, they aren’t painful like the ones on durians.

How to eat gac fruit

After much investigation, we finally cut it open and this is what’s inside. Pardon my description, but I thought they looked like little red chicken hearts. I was surprised to see that they were so red but I guess that’s the magic of carotenoids! Anyway, like a durian, the inside of the fruit had clusters of fruit with a black seed nut in the middle. We didn’t do much research on it beforehand and wrongfully tried to eat it plain. How did we know we weren’t supposed to eat the fruit as is? Simple, because it tasted horrible and no fruit ever tastes terrible!

Glutinous rice dessert

After some research we realized that that you’re supposed to use the red gunk as dye for glutinous rice dessert. Since that’s what we found, that was what we were to make. We had to cook the glutinous rice first and when that was almost cooked, we made the base for it out of coconut milk and sugar. After that, we extracted all the red goop out of the gac fruit and mixed it all together before straining it.

Lastly to make it look all pretty and put together, we molded them into squares and put coconut flakes on the top to give it some more texture. All in all, they were pretty good. I think we added a little too much sugar in the coconut base though because it was a little too sweet for our taste.

We were a little disappointed to not taste any of the actual fruit because of the overpowering taste of coconut milk, but we didn’t mind too much because we still got our dose of carotenoids. (: Anyhow, considering how we first started off with this alien looking fruit…it wasn’t too bad of a turnout.