LANZONES, the fruit for the gods!

I'm back in the Philippines for a couple months to work on a project. A dear friend invited me and some friends to her farm in Lipa City, Batangas, where her lanzones trees were primed for picking. I had never seen a lanzones tree before (shame on me, having grown up here), much less one gloriously laden with lanzones bunches. The fruits were the size of golf balls, and so so sweet and juicy. Here's what Wikipedia says about this fruit:

Lansium domesticum, also known as langsat, buahluku or lanzones, is a species of tree in the family Meliaceae. The fruit is can be elliptical, oval, or round. Fruits look much like small potatoes and are borne in clusters similar to grapes. The larger fruits are on the variety known as duku. It is covered by thin, yellow hair giving a slightly fuzzy aspect. The fruit contains 1 to 3 seeds, flat, and bitter tasting; the seeds are covered with a thick, clear-white aril that is tastes sweet and sour. The taste has been likened to a combination of grape and grapefruit and is considered excellent by most. The sweet juicy flesh contains sucrose, fructose, and glucose. L. domesticum is cultivated mainly for its fruit, which can be eaten raw. The fruit can also be bottled in syrup. The wood is hard, thick, heavy, and resilient, allowing it to be used in the construction of rural houses.

Some parts of the plant are used in making traditional medicine. The bitter seeds can be pounded and mixed with water to make a deworming and ulcer medication. The bark is used to treat dysentery and malaria; the powdered bark can also be used to treat scorpion stings. The fruit's skin is used to treat diarrhea, and in the Philippines the dried skin is burned as a mosquito repellent. The skin, especially of the langsat variety, can be dried and burned as incense.

The greatest producers of lansium domesticum are Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. The production is mostly for internal consumption, although some are exported to Singapore and Hong Kong.

 

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