How to Prepare Durian

Every once in a while, I’ll go to Chinatown and pick up some exotic fruits that I can’t easily find anywhere else. On this particular trip, I saw a vendor selling durian and decided to pick some up to try it. Durian is easy to spot – they have spiky husks and the flesh is incredibly foul-smelling (in fact, some people find it so repulsive that they’ve made laws to ban the fruit on public transportation!) I’ve never had it before this trip, but my cousin and my uncle are both big fans of it and I decided to give it a try. The fruit has a smooth and creamy consistency like a banana, but is also *slightly* fibrous. Here’s the vendor preparing our durian:

And a video of how fast the vendor cuts it up:

The cut up fruit:

The taste of the durian, to me, was like creamy yet fibrous green onions. Combined with the smell of it was a little too much to handle (some people say it smells like vomit, I thought it smelled like gasoline). We actually walked into a store and people were looking around for the smell, even though we double bagged it. We ended up triple bagging it (with a super heavy duty Apple store bag) that got rid of the smell, although I’m not sure why we kept it because as soon as I brought it home, I realized that it was going to make my fridge stink so I ended up throwing the entire thing away. Maybe I should’ve mailed it to Carol from Alinea at Home – she has to eat it because her readers helped raise so much money for Share our Strength!