I've tasted so many passion fruit flavored things and loved them so it was time to see what the actual fruit was all about. I had never seen the inside of a passion fruit before but I have to say it looks pretty disgusting! It made me laugh to think about who on earth was the first person willing to put this in their mouth? The taste was pretty good but mine was very tart. This is the kind of fruit where the good stuff is bound around the seeds so you have to break it free or eat the seed with it.
The horned melon was a whole story all it's own. I cut open this yellowish-orange horned monster to find it filled with green slime! Similar to the passion fruit, the flesh (if you can call it that??) is bound to the seeds. The flesh is bright green and slimy and oozes like some toy a little boy would love. The taste was pretty strange too: pretty much a cross between a cucumber and a banana (the not too ripe version of a banana). I can see now why there really aren't many 'horned melon' recipes out there.Hmm... what to do with these two peculiar fruits...I spent some time flipping through Pinterest for inspiration. The passion fruit had several options but I only one so that limited my recipe abilities. For the horned melon, the best thing I saw was some sort of a salad dressing out of the 'gel'. The salad dressing had potential but I wanted to make something more interesting than that. Finally, I decided my best option was a sorbet where I would use the passion fruit AND the horned melon mixed with pineapple. Let's see what happens....
First, I needed to find the easiest way to break the flesh of these fruits off of the seeds. I had read that just trying to push the 'gel' from the horned melon through a strainer was a tedious process because it did not want to leave it's precious seed behind. So, I decided to clean out the flesh and seeds of both the passion fruit and horned melon and run them through the blender for a 30 seconds or so to break everything loose. It worked!!! Ha... I bested you GREEN SLIME!
From here, it was pretty quick to put the mixture through a fine strainer and separate what was now basically liquid from the seed particles.
Once I had my passion fruit/horned melon 'juice', I put it with some pineapple juice and 1 cup of sugar in a pot on the stove and let it simmer until the sugar was all melted and I could tell the consistency was starting to thicken just a little bit. Oh and I almost forgot, somewhere along the way I added a little almond milk to add to the creaminess (maybe 1/3 cup or so?). When this was finished I put the mixture along with about 2 cups of chopped pineapple in the blender and let it run until it was smooth.
I had read that you could blend a sorbet mix about every hour as it's freezing to help give it that airy consistency and keep it from freezing rock solid. Well... I started out with this in mind and I did blend it after each of the first few hours but then I got tired and decided to go to bed instead. It would end up however it ended up!
And - TahDAH! While a bit more solid than the kind you buy at the store, my horned melon/passion fruit/pineapple sorbet turned out pretty tasty! The one catch... it tasted pretty much like pineapple sorbet. :) Oops...
What would I do differently next time? I would use about half the amount of pineapple and about a third the amount of pineapple juice to make this mix. Also, if I'm being honest, I might just skip the horned melon and use more passion fruit! It was fun to play with this new fruit but I just didn't see much benefit in it. It probably would still make a good salad dressing so maybe someday I'll give that one a try.
On to the next foodie adventure...
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