Granadilla or grenadia sucrée?

What do you do when you come across a fruit from your childhood and want to try and figure out its real name? You spend hours with an aunt looking it up in encyclopedias, cookbooks and even online. But what if looking it up leaves you even more confused than you were before? What if you can’t tell the difference between it and another popular fruit but your taste buds tell you they are definitely not one and the same?

Well, you refer to it by the name you always knew and you write an article about it!

Dear readers, allow me to introduce you to the fruit some call granadilla, grenadia sucrée (the English equivalent would be sweet passion fruit), or even passiflore, the fruit family to which it seems to belong; the very same family my not so beloved passion fruit belongs to. Allow me to introduce you to the fruit that brought a smile to my face as I recalled precious childhood days.

I can’t really remember the last time I had some grenadia sucrée before receiving this batch from a close family member. I was definitely much younger and I always had quite a fun time eating them. Granadillas were one of the famous fruits of our hikes to Kenscoff, the kind of fruit that kept us going. Much like the kalbasik from my previous article, we would buy them when we reached the nearby town of Kenscoff and bring them back home in a bag. They served as our reward for our efforts to survive the three-hour walk up and downhill.

Just knowing that one of the adults was carrying some home was indeed enough to give us the energy and strength we needed to keep walking. They were just the push we needed to keep going when our short legs were failing us for we were looking forward to the fruity feast we would have as soon as we got home.

And in fact, we could barely ever wait to make it home. The minute we made it through the front gate we would rush to the kitchen, grab a spoon, cut open our granadillas and extract their pulp in a quick slurp enjoying the crunchy noise their seeds made once they hit our teeth, an experience I came to realize my younger brother never had.

As I was gobbling up those fruits the other day and reliving times passed, he asked me how I managed to eat it all. He had not swallowed the many seeds for he didn’t know they were edible. Instead, he had simply sucked the pulp and thrown the rest out. That’s when I gave him my grenadia sucrée crash course.

Everything inside that fruit is edible. Much like the grenadia or passion fruit, granadillas are an oval shape fruit which orange outer shell hides a sweet jelly-like pulp wrapped around crunchy edible seeds. The main difference between those two fruits seems to be in the color of their flesh, their taste and use. While the passion fruit exhibits a yellow pulp on the sour side and its seeds are thrown out after extracting their juice, the granadillas are typically white and sweet and eaten as is without leaving anything out.

So if you are ever handed one of those fruits, grab a spoon, crack the soft outer shell open and enjoy the crunchiness of all the pulpy seeds that you should definitely swallow. Please don’t waste them like my brother did, you now know better than that.

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3 Comments

  • Missmo

    C’est toujours avec plaisir 😉

  • Missmo

    Bonjour Anick

    Très bel article. Ca faisait longtemps que je ne vous avais lue et j’ai appris grâce à vous ou me suis rappelé qu’il y avait la grenadia (fruit de la passion ou maracudja en Guadeloupe) et la la grenadilla. Ce fruit est beaucoup plus rare, on le trouve très rarement.

    J’ai trouvé quelques infos sur wikipédia apparemment on l’appelle également grenadelle, grenadille sucrée ou grenadille douce.

    Un autre fruit de plus en plus rare ici avec une forme allongée mais avec la peau lisse ressemble beaucoup à l’intérieur à la grenadilla.

    Merci pour votre article.

    • annick

      Missmo! Contente de vous retrouver sur Tchaka! Merci d’avoir pris le temps de déguster mes articles! 🙂

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