Strange fruit
Dec 20th, 2006 by Peter
About 1½ year ago, my wife tried to explain about the Chinese Date / Jujube fruit.
Kinda hard for me to grasp, since this was done through the internet, and her English vocabulary were much more limited back then. Also the fruit is not common here, and even though I finally found pictures and a description, I didn’t have a clue how they tasted.
Apparently Jujube is big in China. It’s used for a load of things. Stuff like a food ingredient in soup and rice and so on. It can be dropped in a kettle of tea to sweeten and can be eaten as a snack. It has a high level of vitamin C and is said to be healthy.
I have only seen and tasted it as dried, but I suspect that the fresh ones are much better.
C brought a few bags of these to Denmark when she came, and I ate them with delight the first 2 weeks. Now they have grown old on me. The taste is too blahhh after a while. They taste a bit like prunes or figs, but I can’t really pinpoint it completely. Most correct would be to say that they taste like well. like Jujube.
Even though I don’t do my share of finishing off the bags anymore, they are slowly gets emptied. C uses them in her tea. Every day she brings a thermos of tea which I carefully prepare by dropping tea leaves and 3 Jujube fruits inside. I don’t like the taste of that combination much. It makes the tea taste too sweet and “pruney”.
What I do like, however, is how they can be used in liquor. C told me her father drink a small glass if rice liquor with Jujube, ginseng and some other red berries (I can’t spell the name, but it sounds like “go-cheesee” if said it in English).
C did bring one genuine bottle of Chinese rice liquor with her to Denmark as a gift for me. I couldn’t bear mixing it up, since such a bottle is unique here in Denmark. So I looked for alternatives and turned to all Danes favorite.. Snaps. So I made a Danish/Chinese combo. FYI it tastes great and is highly recommended by yours truly.
A few pictures:
I can vouch for the Chinese/Danish combo in snaps :)