How to eat sugar-apple 🍏

Intensely sweet, custardy, and floral — vanilla, pear, and rosewater — with grainy-silky flesh that dissolves like soft meringue. Each segment wraps a glossy black seed (spit them; they're mildly toxic crushed).

Sugar-apple is mainly a Summer and Autumn fruit, with exact months depending on the growing region and hemisphere.

Pull it apart and eat segment by segment — nature's custard, no spoon needed.

Gives to a gentle squeeze and the scales separate slightly, showing cream-coloured valleys.

Sugar-apple is a nutritious everyday fruit, best enjoyed as part of a varied diet. It is a good source of fibre (about 4.4 g per 100 g), which supports digestion and satiety. It is a good source of vitamin C (about 36.3 mg per 100 g), supporting immune function and helping the body absorb iron from plant foods.

A typical fruit serving is roughly a handful, one medium fruit, or about 80 g, and two or more varied fruit servings a day is a sensible everyday pattern. Because it is high in natural sugar, keep portions modest if you are watching blood sugar or weight — whole fruit's fibre softens the sugar hit, but juices and dried forms concentrate it and are easy to over-eat.

Atis in the Philippines, sweetsop across the Caribbean, srikaya in Indonesia and Malaysia, sitaphal or sharifa in India, noi-na (น้อยหน่า) in Thailand, and anón in parts of Latin America. It is also loosely called custard apple in English, which causes constant confusion with its relatives.

They are four different fruits in the same genus. Sugar apple (Annona squamosa) is small and knobbly with segments that pull apart in your fingers. Cherimoya (Annona cherimola) is larger, with smoother scaled skin and a creamier, more aromatic flesh. Atemoya is the deliberate hybrid of the two. "Custard apple" is the loosest term of all — in India and the Philippines it usually means sugar apple, in Australia it means atemoya, and botanically it belongs to Annona reticulata, the bullock's heart. When a recipe says custard apple, check which country wrote it.

The segments separate slightly, so the skin looks like it is opening along its seams, and the whole fruit gives to gentle pressure — much like a ripe avocado. Colour shifts from hard grey-green to a paler, yellowish or dusty green. Hard fruit ripens on the counter in a few days. Once ripe it lasts barely a day or two, and it splits if you leave it.

No. Like other Annona fruits, the glossy black seeds are toxic and are spat out, never chewed or blended. Historically the crushed seeds were used as an insecticide. The white flesh around them is the edible part.