We talk about all the ways to cook, bake, fry or toss a fruit, but we rarely talk about just eating a fruit, just as nature made it.
We talk about ways to enhance a fruit’s flavor, or adding them to traditionally savory dishes where they might not belong, or making them into desserts and adding sugar until they turn into a hyperactive version of what we were looking for, complete with a high and a crash.
We talk about incorporating more fruit into our diets, but we rarely talk about the pure, unadulterated pleasure of enjoying a fruit ALL BY ITSELF.
Yes, you can derive comfort from a traditionally prepared dish, and get satisfaction from sitting with a group of people around a table laden with deliciously prepared foods, but there is something viscerally amazing about plucking a fruit simply to eat it by yourself, with your bare hands, while its juice runs down your chin.
Fortunately, many fruits seem to be created with just the hand in mind: apples and pears especially seem to be just the right size to hold in your hand and eat your way around; if you’re lucky you’ll only get one hand covered in sticky fruit juice. Cherries are an even easier fruit to devour – you can pop them into your mouth whole and simply chew around the pit. One of my favorite fruits, however, is not quite as easy to eat: the mango.
As far as tropical fruits go, the mango does not travel well. It is best – like all fruits – fresh from the tree, during its harvest season – in Southern Mexico, throughout most of May. Regardless of how or where you get your mango, its rubbery skin is not meant for eating, and its monstrous pit makes it hard to cut up.
It took me a long time to finally ask someone for a good way to cut a mango, but once I did I was glad. Once you know the trick, it is much easier to want to enjoy them on a regular basis.
You start by cutting the mango in thirds: stand it on its end and cut just to one side of the center, therefore slicing all the flesh off one side of the pit. Repeat on the other side, so you have two sides of just flesh with a flat egg-shaped piece with the pit in the middle.
You can either scoop the flesh out of the two sides of the mango, or you can score it to get cubes. You do this the same way you would an avocado: cut vertical strips into the mango flesh down to the skin, then horizontal strips to create what look like squares.
Turn the mango skin inside out, and cut the mango squares off the skin into a bowl.
For the flesh around the pit, peel the outer strip of skin off, then take a bite (it’s so delicious, how can you avoid it?)
Cut the flesh off the sides of the pit; you can also cut any additional flesh off the front and back if you didn’t cut close enough when you cut it into thirds.
Mangoes are good in many things, but for best results, take a spoon and the bowl full of mango squares and eat them all by themselves. Feel free to let the juice drip down your chin.
