Fruits in season in May

Peak fruit seasons flip between hemispheres, so what's ripe in May depends on where you are. Below, May is split into the Northern and Southern hemisphere harvests. Peak months are approximate and shift with region and weather.

Northern hemisphere — May

Acai

A small, dark-purple palm berry from the Amazon floodplains — earthy, low-sugar, and famously antioxidant-rich, blended into the thick frozen bowls that made it a global health food.

Berry Year-round

African black plum

A sweet, blue-black African fruit from a savanna tree — soft, date-like flesh tasting of prune and chocolate, eaten fresh, dried, and cooked into a molasses-like sweetener. A valued wild food and medicine across West and Central Africa.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

African locust bean

A West African tree whose long pods hold two treasures — a sweet, yellow, powdery pulp eaten fresh or in drinks, and seeds fermented into dawadawa, the pungent, protein-rich condiment that seasons much of West African cooking.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

African star apple

West Africa's dry-season obsession — the orange fruit Nigerians know as agbalumo or udara, sweet-sharp with a skin you chew like gum. When harmattan winds blow, its street price is a national conversation.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Apple

The world's most cultivated temperate fruit — crisp, sweet-tart, endlessly varied across 7,500+ cultivars, and the keeper of the cold-storage crown that puts it on shelves year-round.

Pome Autumn Year-round

Apricot

The golden miniature of the stone-fruit family — musky, honeyed, and tragically fragile fresh, which is why the world knows it best dried. Central Asia's ancient orchard treasure.

Stone fruit Summer Spring

Arazá

A large, fragrant, intensely sour yellow fruit of the western Amazon — too acidic to eat raw but transcendent as juice, ice cream, and jam. A Myrtaceae cousin of guava with a heady tropical perfume.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Avocado

The fruit that thinks it's a fat — buttery, savory, and unique in the plant kingdom for its oil-rich flesh. Botanically a single-seeded berry; culturally, toast's best friend and guacamole's soul.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round Summer

Babaco

A seedless, five-sided golden fruit from the Ecuadorian highlands — a natural papaya-family hybrid tasting of pineapple, strawberry, and papaya, with skin you can eat and flesh light enough to earn it the nickname "champagne fruit."

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Banana

The world's most-eaten fruit — a portable, potassium-rich energy bar that grows on a giant herb, not a tree. The Philippines' Lakatan and Saba varieties go far beyond the supermarket Cavendish.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Banana passionfruit

An elongated, banana-shaped yellow passionfruit from the Andes — soft orange pulp that's sweet-tart and intensely aromatic, the base of Colombia's beloved curuba juice and sorbets. A high-altitude vine, and a notorious invader of Pacific islands.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Baobab

The upside-down tree's velvet pod holds a fruit that dries itself — naturally powdery, sherbet-tart pulp that Africa has stirred into drinks for centuries and food science calls one of the most nutrient-dense fruits measured.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Ber

The Indian jujube — a small, crisp, apple-like fruit that ripens through the hot dry season across South Asia and Africa, eaten fresh with salt and chili, dried, or candied. A hardy desert tree fruit beloved from India to the Sahel.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Bilimbi

The starfruit's ferociously sour cousin — small, crisp green fruits so acidic they are used almost entirely as a souring agent, the tart heart of Filipino sinigang and countless pickles.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round Summer

Breadfruit

The starch that grows on trees — a football of creamy, potato-like flesh that fed Polynesian voyages and sparked the mutiny on the Bounty. Roasted, it earns the name; fried, it beats the potato at its own game.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Year-round

Bullock's heart

The heart-shaped, red-blushed member of the custard-apple clan — smooth-skinned and netted, with soft, creamy, mildly sweet flesh. Less perfumed than its cousins but widely grown from India to the Caribbean as an easygoing dooryard dessert.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Cacao

The pod behind chocolate — but its fresh white pulp is a delicious fruit in its own right, sweet-tart and floral, sucked from the beans across the tropics. The seeds, fermented and roasted, become cocoa; the fruit around them is the tropics' best-kept secret.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Calamansi

The Philippines' tiny, mighty citrus — a kumquat-lime hybrid the size of a ping-pong ball whose fragrant, complex sourness seasons everything from pancit to iced tea.

Citrus Year-round

Cashew apple

The juicy, bell-shaped "fruit" the cashew nut dangles beneath — technically a swollen stem, gloriously fragrant, and so fragile that most of the world's crop is drunk within miles of the tree. Brazil turns it into juice; Goa distills it into feni.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Cherry

The fleeting jewel of early summer — glossy, snappy, and gone in weeks. Sweet cherries for the bowl, sour cherries for the pie, and a blossom season that stops whole nations to look up.

Stone fruit Summer Spring

Cocona

An Amazonian relative of the tomato and naranjilla — glossy orange fruit with a tomato's body and a citrus-lime tang, cooked into savory sauces and sweet drinks across the rainforest. Neither fruit nor vegetable, and used happily as both.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Coconut

The tree of life — drink, food, oil, bowl, and rope from one ocean-borne seed. Two fruits in one lifespan: young buko with electrolyte water and silky jelly, then mature nut with rich white meat.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Date

The desert's candy and civilization's first sweetener — a palm fruit so energy-dense it fed caravans across empty quarters. Medjools eat like soft caramel; Deglet Noors like honeyed toffee.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Year-round

Desert date

A tough, thorny tree of the Sahel and dry Africa bearing bittersweet date-like fruit — a drought-defying famine food eaten across the arid belt, with edible oil in its seed and soap-like saponins throughout. A true survival plant.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Dewberry

A trailing, ground-hugging cousin of the blackberry that ripens weeks earlier — soft, dark, dusty-blue berries gathered along fences and roadsides, especially across the American South where dewberry cobbler marks the start of berry season.

Berry Spring Summer

Gandaria

A small golden "plum mango" from Southeast Asia — a mango relative the size of an apricot, eaten ripe and sweet or green and sour in salads and sambals across Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Gingerbread plum

A hardy Sahelian fruit tree of West Africa's dry sands — its orange, plum-like fruit has mealy sweetish flesh, while the large seed hides an oil-rich edible kernel used like an almond. A dependable dry-season food where little else fruits.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Goumi

A speckled scarlet berry from a hardy, nitrogen-fixing East Asian shrub — astringent until dead-ripe, then sweet-tart and tomato-bright, rich in lycopene. A forager's and permaculturist's favorite that improves the soil while it feeds you.

Berry Spring Summer

Granadilla

The passionfruit's gentle sibling — an orange shell that cracks like an Easter egg around silvery, slurpable pulp with all of the perfume and none of the pucker. The Andes' favorite fruit to hand a child.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Grapefruit

An 18th-century Caribbean accident — pomelo crossed with sweet orange — that became breakfast's most polarizing citrus: bitter, bracing, and beloved once your palate grows into it.

Citrus Winter Spring

Green sapote

A Central American cousin of the mamey sapote with thinner, olive-green skin and sweet, russet-red flesh tasting of pumpkin, caramel, and sweet potato. A prized but uncommon highland fruit of Guatemala and Honduras.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Guava

The tropics' perfume bomb — a humble green orb whose aroma fills rooms and whose vitamin C embarrasses citrus four times over. Eaten crunchy-green with salt in Asia, pink-ripe and fragrant in the Americas.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round Autumn

Haskap

An edible honeysuckle with oblong indigo berries that beat strawberries to the punch — the first fruit of the northern year. Ainu heritage in Hokkaido, Siberian hardiness, Canadian breeding: a berry built for the cold with a raspberry-blueberry heart.

Berry Spring Summer

Jackalberry

The sweet yellow fruit of a giant African savanna tree — a wild persimmon relative loved by jackals, elephants, and people alike, eaten fresh, dried, or brewed into beer across the continent's bushveld.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Jackfruit

The largest tree-borne fruit on earth — up to 40 kg of bumpy green armor around honeyed golden pods that taste like Juicy Fruit gum, plus an unripe stage that shreds like pulled pork.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Kiwi

A Chinese vine fruit rebranded by New Zealand into a global icon — emerald flesh, edible black seeds, dessert-bright acidity, and more vitamin C than an orange, gram for gram.

Berry Winter Spring

Lemon

The kitchen's universal acid — a citron-sour orange hybrid whose juice seasons, preserves, tenderizes, and brightens virtually every cuisine on earth. Meyer lemons add a sweeter, floral variation.

Citrus Winter Year-round

Lime

The tropical acid — sharper and greener-tasting than lemon, indispensable from Mexican taquerías to Thai curries to the world's cocktail shakers. Where the lemon can't grow, the lime rules.

Citrus Year-round

Loquat

Spring''s first stone fruit impostor — an apricot-colored pome (apple family!) with juicy, floral sweet-tart flesh and big glossy seeds. A backyard giveaway across the subtropics, a cough-syrup icon in China.

Pome Spring

Lychee

China's imperial berry — rose-scented, grape-fleshed, jade-seeded, and adored for two millennia. An emperor famously ran pony express relays just to deliver it fresh; one taste explains why.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Spring

Macambo

A large, ridged relative of cacao from the Amazon, with sweet white pulp like its cousin and — unusually — big, edible seeds that are roasted like chestnuts or almonds. An ancient Amazonian crop enjoying a revival as a superfood snack.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Makrut lime

The bumpy, warty lime whose double-lobed leaves perfume tom yum, green curry, and half the kitchens of Southeast Asia. The fruit gives little juice — this is a citrus you cook with, prized for zest and leaf rather than the glass.

Citrus Year-round

Mamey sapote

The salmon-fleshed giant of Latin America — a rough brown football hiding flesh like sweet-potato custard laced with almond, apricot, and pumpkin spice. Cuba's milkshake monarch.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Spring

Mango

The world's most beloved tropical stone fruit — honey-sweet golden flesh with floral, resinous notes. The Philippine Carabao variety is prized as one of the sweetest on earth.

Stone fruit Spring Summer

Manila tamarind

Not a true tamarind but a curly, coiled pod hiding sweet-and-sour pink or white pulp around shiny black seeds. A hardy street and dryland tree from Mexico to the Philippines, its pods a cherished childhood snack.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Mayhaw

A small red hawthorn from the swamps of the American Deep South, ripening in May when little else does — too tart to eat raw, but the source of a pale, ruby jelly so prized it has its own festivals across Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia.

Pome Spring

Meyer lemon

A lemon-mandarin hybrid with thin, fragrant skin and low-acid, faintly sweet juice — rounder and more floral than a grocery lemon. A backyard and chef's darling that bruises too easily to ship far.

Citrus Winter Spring

Miracle fruit

A small red West African berry with a startling trick — its protein miraculin coats the tongue and makes sour foods taste intensely sweet for up to an hour, though the berry itself is nearly flavorless.

Berry Year-round

Mountain papaya

A small, fragrant, cold-hardy cousin of the papaya from the high Andes — too astringent to eat raw, but transformed by cooking into some of South America's most beloved preserves, candied sweets, and aromatic drinks.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Mulberry

The silk tree's secret dessert — blackberry-lookalike fruit that stains fingers purple and never reaches supermarkets because it dissolves in transit. A backyard and market-stall treasure worldwide.

Berry Summer Spring

Naranjilla

The Andes' "little orange" — a fuzzy orange fruit with electric-green, intensely tangy pulp that makes one of South America's most refreshing juices, rhubarb-meets-lime-meets-pineapple in a glass.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Noni

A knobbly, pale, pungent tropical fruit famous less for flavor than for its potent smell and its reputation as a Polynesian and Southeast Asian medicine. A hardy pioneer plant whose fermented juice became a global health fad.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Orange

The world's benchmark citrus — an ancient pomelo-mandarin hybrid whose name became a color and whose vitamin C reputation launched a juice industry. Navels for eating, Valencias for squeezing.

Citrus Winter Spring

Otaheite gooseberry

Pale ribbed fruit that dangles in grape-like ropes straight from the branch, sharp enough to make lemons nervous. A tropical dooryard tree from India to the Caribbean, grown for pickles, candy, and blush-pink syrups rather than fresh eating.

Berry Spring Autumn

Papaya

A soft, sunset-orange melon-like fruit that grows like a palm-tree lantern — gentle, musky sweetness, legendary digestive enzymes, and a green unripe stage that's a vegetable in its own right.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Passion fruit

The loudest flavor per gram in the fruit kingdom — a wrinkled shell of golden pulp whose tropical-tart perfume can season a whole cake with one spoonful. Wrinkles mean ready, not ruined.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Pineapple

A South American bromeliad that became the crown of tropical fruit — literally the symbol of hospitality. Sweet-sharp golden flesh, a protein-eating enzyme, and a Philippine export empire.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Year-round

Plantain

The banana that went savory — bigger, starchier, and thicker-skinned, treated as a vegetable from Lagos to San Juan to Manila. Green it's a potato; black it's dessert; every stage in between has a recipe.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Rose apple

A small, crisp, hollow fruit whose pale flesh genuinely tastes and smells of rosewater — light, floral, and more perfume than sugar, best eaten fresh off the tree.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Spring

Salak

The snake fruit — a fig-sized teardrop wrapped in genuine reptile-pattern scales, hiding crisp ivory lobes that taste of pineapple, pear, and something fermented-honeyed. Indonesia's spikiest handshake.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round Summer

Salmonberry

A glowing orange-to-red bramble berry of the Pacific Northwest rainforest — one of the first fruits of spring, gathered for millennia by coastal First Nations who ate its berries and young shoots alike.

Berry Spring Summer

Sansapote

A large, rough-skinned Central American fruit with sweet, deep-orange, fibrous flesh tasting of pumpkin and sweet potato. A humble backyard sapote of Mexico and the isthmus, eaten fresh off the tree and beloved by children and monkeys alike.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Sapodilla

The brown-sugar fruit — dusty tan skin over caramel flesh that tastes like a pear baked in molasses. Also the tree that gave the world chewing gum, before synthetics took the job.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Winter

Soursop

The tropics' creamiest sour fruit — a spiky green giant whose white pulp tastes like strawberry-pineapple custard with citrus lightning. The soul of Latin sorbets and Filipino juice stands alike.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Star apple

Cut this glossy purple globe crosswise and a translucent star appears — hence the name. Its milky, sweet flesh made it a beloved dooryard fruit from the Caribbean to the Philippines, where merienda under a kaimito tree is childhood itself.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Spring

Starfruit

The fruit that slices into stars — waxy golden ridges, crisp grape-citrus flesh, and zero prep beyond a knife. A garnish celebrity that's genuinely good eating, with one serious kidney-health caveat.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Strawberry

The world's favorite berry — a rose-family hybrid whose seeds sit on the outside, whose peak-season perfume defines "fruity," and whose highland farms bring temperate sweetness to the tropics.

Berry Winter Spring

Sugar palm fruit

The translucent, chewy seed-fruit of the sugar palm — sold as kaong or kolang-kaling, boiled and sweetened for halo-halo and festive sweets across Southeast Asia. The same palm gives one of the region's finest sugars.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Surinam cherry

A ribbed, pumpkin-shaped little fruit that ripens from green through orange to deep crimson-black — sweet-tart and resinous, the beloved pitanga of Brazilian backyards.

Berry Spring Summer

Sweet lime

A pale-green citrus that looks like a lime but tastes barely sour — a mild, sweetish, low-acid juice fruit that fuels roadside juice stalls across India as mosambi, and grows around the Mediterranean as limetta.

Citrus Winter Spring

Tamarind

The sour engine of half the world's cuisines — a legume pod whose sticky brown pulp powers sinigang, pad thai, agua de tamarindo, Worcestershire sauce, and chutneys across four continents.

Tropical & subtropical Spring Summer

Tomato

Botanically a fruit, legally a vegetable (US Supreme Court, 1893), culturally indispensable — the Andean berry that conquered every cuisine on earth and became the world's most-grown "vegetable."

Berry Summer Year-round

Ume

Japan's green "plum" that is botanically closer to an apricot — and almost never eaten raw. Salted into umeboshi, steeped into umeshu, or simmered into syrup, ume turns mouth-puckering acidity into some of Asia's most beloved preserved flavors.

Stone fruit Spring Summer

Wax apple

A glossy, bell-shaped tropical fruit with the crunch of a watery apple and a light, refreshing sweetness — Southeast Asia's favorite hot-weather thirst-quencher, eaten skin and all.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Spring

Southern hemisphere — May

Abiu

A smooth, bright-yellow Amazonian fruit with clear, jelly-like flesh that tastes of caramel-vanilla custard — one of the gentlest and sweetest of the sapote family.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Acai

A small, dark-purple palm berry from the Amazon floodplains — earthy, low-sugar, and famously antioxidant-rich, blended into the thick frozen bowls that made it a global health food.

Berry Year-round

Acerola

A small, bright-red cherry-lookalike from the tropical Americas that packs one of the highest vitamin C concentrations of any fruit — the reason it fills supplement bottles worldwide.

Berry Summer Autumn

Ambarella

A crunchy tropical fruit with pineapple-mango tartness — eaten green and sour with salt, or ripe and sweet — hiding a spiky fibrous pit at its core.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Apple

The world's most cultivated temperate fruit — crisp, sweet-tart, endlessly varied across 7,500+ cultivars, and the keeper of the cold-storage crown that puts it on shelves year-round.

Pome Autumn Year-round

Araçá

A wild Brazilian guava with a strawberry twist — small red or yellow fruit whose sweet-tart, aromatic pulp tastes of guava crossed with berries. Adored in southern Brazil's backyards and juice bars, and infamous elsewhere as an invasive escape artist.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Araticum

The custard-apple of Brazil's cerrado savanna — a large, rugged brown fruit with intensely sweet, aromatic yellow flesh. Strongly flavored and much loved in Minas Gerais, where marolo sweets and liqueurs celebrate the harvest.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Arazá

A large, fragrant, intensely sour yellow fruit of the western Amazon — too acidic to eat raw but transcendent as juice, ice cream, and jam. A Myrtaceae cousin of guava with a heady tropical perfume.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Asam gelugur

A large, ribbed, sour green-to-yellow fruit of the mangosteen family, grown in Malaysia and Thailand almost entirely to be sliced and sun-dried into a tangy souring agent — the tamarind of the Malay kitchen, giving fish curries their bright acidity.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Asian pear

The round, crisp, ultra-juicy pear of East Asia — eaten firm like an apple rather than soft like a European pear, refreshingly sweet and used as much for cooking and gifting as for snacking.

Pome Autumn

Atemoya

The engineered love-child of sugar-apple and cherimoya — created in Florida in 1908 and perfected in Taiwan and Australia. Custard-sweet with a pineapple tang, fewer seeds, and a hardier disposition than either famous parent.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Avocado

The fruit that thinks it's a fat — buttery, savory, and unique in the plant kingdom for its oil-rich flesh. Botanically a single-seeded berry; culturally, toast's best friend and guacamole's soul.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round Summer

Babaco

A seedless, five-sided golden fruit from the Ecuadorian highlands — a natural papaya-family hybrid tasting of pineapple, strawberry, and papaya, with skin you can eat and flesh light enough to earn it the nickname "champagne fruit."

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Bacaba

A tall Amazonian palm whose purple-black fruit yields a rich, oily, chocolate-brown drink — "bacaba wine" — much like açaí but milder and creamier. A cherished staple of the Brazilian Amazon, drunk sweetened with sugar and cassava flour.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Bacuri

One of the Amazon's most prized flavors — a thick-skinned fruit whose fragrant, sweet-tart white pulp becomes some of Brazil's greatest ice cream and mousse. A relative of mangosteen, so loved in Pará that the pulp is priced like a delicacy.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Banana

The world's most-eaten fruit — a portable, potassium-rich energy bar that grows on a giant herb, not a tree. The Philippines' Lakatan and Saba varieties go far beyond the supermarket Cavendish.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Banana passionfruit

An elongated, banana-shaped yellow passionfruit from the Andes — soft orange pulp that's sweet-tart and intensely aromatic, the base of Colombia's beloved curuba juice and sorbets. A high-altitude vine, and a notorious invader of Pacific islands.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Bignay

Long grape-like clusters of tiny berries that ripen unevenly from green to red to near-black — sour to sweet-tart on one string — famous across the Philippines as a wine and jam fruit.

Berry Summer Autumn

Bilimbi

The starfruit's ferociously sour cousin — small, crisp green fruits so acidic they are used almost entirely as a souring agent, the tart heart of Filipino sinigang and countless pickles.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round Summer

Biriba

An Amazonian custard-apple cousin whose soft, spiny yellow skin hides white flesh that tastes uncannily of lemon meringue pie — one of the sweetest, most delicate fruits of the tropics, and one of the most fragile.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Black sapote

A green tomato-shaped persimmon relative whose ripe flesh turns glossy black and tastes uncannily like sweet chocolate pudding — a natural dessert with almost no fat.

Tropical & subtropical Winter Autumn

Blackberry

The hedgerow's free dessert — glossy, wine-dark aggregate berries that carry their core with them, deeper and more tannic than raspberries, and the anchor of crumbles and bramble jelly.

Berry Summer Autumn

Blue quandong

A startlingly bright-blue rainforest fruit from eastern Australia and the tropics — thin, tart-mild flesh over a large, intricately sculptured seed. A traditional Aboriginal food and cassowary favorite, more famous for its electric-blue color and its bead-like stones than its modest flavor.

Berry Autumn Winter

Bolwarra

A small, urn-shaped green fruit of an ancient Australian rainforest shrub — sweet, aromatic, and jelly-fleshed, tasting of guava and pear with a spicy note. A traditional Aboriginal food and a native bush-food flavoring, from one of the most primitive flowering-plant families on earth.

Berry Summer Autumn

Breadfruit

The starch that grows on trees — a football of creamy, potato-like flesh that fed Polynesian voyages and sparked the mutiny on the Bounty. Roasted, it earns the name; fried, it beats the potato at its own game.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Year-round

Breadnut

The seeded, wild ancestor of the breadfruit — a spiny green globe packed with chestnut-like seeds that are boiled or roasted across the Caribbean and Pacific. Grown for its nutritious nuts rather than its starchy flesh.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Burdekin plum

A flattened, purple-black Australian fruit that must be stored to soften before it's edible — then reveals tart-sweet, wine-dark flesh around a distinctive sculptured seed. A traditional Aboriginal food of the northern rainforests, made into jams and country wine.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Buriti

The scaly red fruit of the towering moriche palm, one of the Amazon's most important wild foods — orange, oily flesh spectacularly rich in beta-carotene, eaten as sweets, drinks, and (as aguaje) a Peruvian street staple with a devoted following.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Bush tomato

A small desert fruit of central Australia that dries to a raisin right on the bush — intensely savory-sweet with caramel, tomato, and tamarillo notes. A cornerstone Aboriginal food, ground into a spice (akudjura) that's now a star of native Australian cooking.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Cacao

The pod behind chocolate — but its fresh white pulp is a delicious fruit in its own right, sweet-tart and floral, sucked from the beans across the tropics. The seeds, fermented and roasted, become cocoa; the fruit around them is the tropics' best-kept secret.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Calafate

A small, dark blue-purple berry of Patagonia — sweet-tart and richly flavored, gathered from thorny shrubs across the windswept south. Made into jams, ice cream, and pisco sours, and wrapped in the legend that whoever eats it will return to Patagonia.

Berry Summer Autumn

Calamansi

The Philippines' tiny, mighty citrus — a kumquat-lime hybrid the size of a ping-pong ball whose fragrant, complex sourness seasons everything from pancit to iced tea.

Citrus Year-round

Cambuci

A green, flattened, flying-saucer-shaped fruit of Brazil's Atlantic forest — intensely sour and wildly aromatic, almost never eaten raw but transformed into some of São Paulo's most prized artisan juices, sorbets, and caipirinhas.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Cape gooseberry

A golden marble in a papery lantern husk — sweet-tart and tomatoey-tropical, eaten fresh as a fancy garnish, dried like a raisin, or cooked into jams across the Andes and beyond.

Berry Summer Autumn

Capulí

The Andean black cherry — small, dark, and sweet with a faintly almond-bitter finish, borne on a highland form of the American black cherry. A cherished dooryard fruit from Mexico through the Andes, eaten fresh and in drinks.

Stone fruit Summer Autumn

Cempedak

A smaller, softer, more intense jackfruit relative from Southeast Asia — deep golden segments with a durian-like richness and heady aroma, often battered and deep-fried whole.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Ceylon gooseberry

A small, velvety, deep-purple fruit from Sri Lanka and southern India — intensely sour and juicy, staining a vivid crimson, and made into some of the most brilliantly colored jams and drinks of the tropics. A close relative of the kei apple.

Berry Summer Autumn

Charichuelo

A ridged, warty yellow fruit of the Amazon and northern South America — a mangosteen relative whose translucent white pulp is sweet-tart and refreshing, tasting of citrus and lychee. A cherished dooryard fruit of Colombia and Peru, little known beyond.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Chayote

A pale-green, pear-shaped, wrinkled gourd from Mesoamerica — crisp, mild, and endlessly versatile, eaten as a fruit-vegetable across Latin America, Asia, and beyond. Its whole plant is edible, from the single soft seed to the shoots and starchy roots.

Melon Autumn Winter

Chupa-chupa

A large Amazonian fruit in the cacao family whose brown-green rind peels to reveal sweet, fibrous, deep-orange flesh you suck off the seeds — a pumpkin-and-apricot flavor sold along the rivers of Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Cocona

An Amazonian relative of the tomato and naranjilla — glossy orange fruit with a tomato's body and a citrus-lime tang, cooked into savory sauces and sweet drinks across the rainforest. Neither fruit nor vegetable, and used happily as both.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Coconut

The tree of life — drink, food, oil, bowl, and rope from one ocean-borne seed. Two fruits in one lifespan: young buko with electrolyte water and silky jelly, then mature nut with rich white meat.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Concord grape

The intensely "grapey" blue-black American grape behind purple grape juice, jelly, and jam — a slip-skin fox grape with a bold, musky-sweet flavor utterly unlike a wine grape. Bred in Massachusetts in 1849 and the taste of American childhood.

Berry Autumn

Cranberry

The bog berry that bounces — too tart to eat raw, essential once sweetened, and the only major fruit harvested by flooding fields into floating crimson seas. Thanksgiving's non-negotiable.

Berry Autumn

Cupuacu

Cacao's Amazonian cousin — a heavy brown pod whose creamy white pulp tastes of chocolate crossed with tropical fruit, and whose seeds make a prized "cupulate" chocolate.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Dabai

A black, olive-like fruit of Sarawak in Borneo whose hard flesh softens in warm water into a rich, savory, avocado-like paste. Eaten with soy sauce and rice, it's a treasured local delicacy — the "Sibu olive" — that inspires seasonal devotion and steep prices.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Davidson plum

A midnight-purple rainforest fruit that looks like a plum and bites like a lemon — Australia's sourest famous native, beloved by chefs for jams, sauces, and a color that dyes everything it touches a glorious magenta.

Stone fruit Summer Autumn

Dragon fruit

A neon-pink cactus fruit with kiwi-crunch seeds and gently sweet flesh — the night-blooming showpiece of tropical fruit stands and smoothie bowls alike.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Durian

Southeast Asia's infamous "King of Fruits" — a spiky armored shell hiding rich, custardy flesh whose aroma divides humanity into devotees and refusers.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Feijoa

New Zealand's adopted obsession — an egg-shaped South American myrtle fruit tasting of pineapple, guava, and mint at once, scooped with a spoon and impossible to buy where it doesn't grow.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Finger lime

An Australian rainforest citrus shaped like a stubby finger, filled with tiny juice pearls that burst like caviar — a native bushfood turned fine-dining garnish.

Citrus Autumn Winter

Giant granadilla

The biggest of all passionfruits — a melon-sized, four-angled fruit whose thick spongy rind is cooked as a vegetable while its perfumed pulp is spooned out and juiced. A tropical dooryard favorite from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Gnetum

A curious Southeast Asian tree that is neither quite a fruit tree nor a nut tree — its red-when-ripe drupes and their seeds are boiled, fried, and above all pounded into emping, the bittersweet Indonesian crackers, while the young leaves go into soup.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Governor's plum

A small, dark-red to purple-black fruit from a thorny tropical tree — sweet-tart and juicy when fully ripe, astringent before, made into jams and jellies across Africa, Madagascar, and South Asia.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Granadilla

The passionfruit's gentle sibling — an orange shell that cracks like an Easter egg around silvery, slurpable pulp with all of the perfume and none of the pucker. The Andes' favorite fruit to hand a child.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Grape

Humanity's most consequential fruit — eight thousand years of wine, raisins, and table grapes from one vine species. Modern breeding turned it into nature's candy; fermentation turned it into civilization's drink.

Berry Summer Autumn

Guabiju

A dark purple myrtle berry of southern South America — sweet, aromatic, and resinous, tasting of blueberry and pine with a hint of the tropics. A cherished wild fruit of the grassland forests of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, eaten fresh and made into liqueur.

Berry Summer Autumn

Guaraná

An Amazonian climbing vine whose red fruit splits to reveal a black seed in white flesh — looking uncannily like an eye. The caffeine-packed seed powers Brazil's national soft drink and the global energy-drink industry.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Guava

The tropics' perfume bomb — a humble green orb whose aroma fills rooms and whose vitamin C embarrasses citrus four times over. Eaten crunchy-green with salt in Asia, pink-ripe and fragrant in the Americas.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round Autumn

Harpephyllum

A tart, red, oval fruit of a handsome South African tree in the mango family — sharp and juicy, made into a rosy jelly, jam, and country wine. A cherished indigenous fruit and street tree of the eastern coast, eaten ripe and prized for preserves.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Ice cream bean

A legume that thinks it's dessert — foot-long pods lined with cottony white pulp that tastes of vanilla ice cream. Amazonian children's favorite candy, and the shade tree that shelters half the coffee in Latin America.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Illawarra plum

A curious "plum" from an Australian conifer — the swollen purple-black stalk beneath the seed is the edible part, with a resinous, plum-and-pine flavor used in native jams, sauces, and desserts along the east coast.

Berry Autumn Winter

Imbe

A small, bright-orange African relative of the mangosteen with thin skin and tangy-sweet flesh clinging to a large seed. A hardy savanna and riverbank tree whose fruit is eaten fresh, brewed into wine, and gathered from the wild across eastern and southern Africa.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Jenipapo

A grey-brown tropical fruit famous twice over — as the source of a blue-black body paint used by Amazonian peoples for millennia, and, ripe and soft, as the base of a musky-sweet Brazilian liqueur and syrup that tastes of dried apple and molasses.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Jussara

The Atlantic-forest twin of açaí — a slender palm whose purple fruit makes an identical rich drink, but which was nearly wiped out because its prized heart-of-palm can only be taken by felling the tree. Now a conservation cause, with fruit-harvesting the key to saving it.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Kakadu plum

A small olive-green fruit from Australia's Top End holding the highest vitamin C ever recorded in a fruit — orders of magnitude beyond oranges. Harvested from wild trees by Aboriginal communities, it powers a growing Indigenous-led industry.

Stone fruit Autumn Winter

Kangaroo apple

An egg-shaped orange fruit of a fast-growing Australian and New Zealand shrub — sweet and mildly tomato-like when fully ripe, but toxic until then. A traditional Aboriginal and Māori food that demands exact ripeness, and a modern source of a steroid-drug precursor.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Karuka

The prized nut pandanus of the New Guinea highlands — a giant screwpine whose huge seed heads yield oily, protein-rich kernels tasting of walnut and coconut. Its harvest is so important that whole families migrate to the forest for "karuka season."

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Kelubi

A sour, scaly-skinned swamp-palm fruit of the Malay Peninsula — a tart cousin of the snake fruit (salak), used as a souring agent and pickled into a tangy relish. A wild wetland fruit of Southeast Asia, sharp enough to make salak seem sweet.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Keppel

The fabled "deodorant fruit" of Javanese royalty — a russet, trunk-borne cousin of the custard apple whose sweet, mango-and-violet flesh was said to perfume the sweat and breath of the keraton's princesses. Now rare enough to be a conservation cause.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Kiwano

A spiky orange melon from the African drylands, its alien shell hiding lime-green jelly studded with seeds — refreshing, cucumber-meets-kiwi, and more spectacle than sweetness.

Melon Summer Autumn

Kiwi

A Chinese vine fruit rebranded by New Zealand into a global icon — emerald flesh, edible black seeds, dessert-bright acidity, and more vitamin C than an orange, gram for gram.

Berry Winter Spring

Kiwiberry

A kiwi the size of a grape with smooth, fuzz-free skin you eat whole — sweeter than its big cousin and hardy to brutal frosts. East Asia's mountain forests knew it first; orchards from Oregon to Poland are catching up.

Berry Autumn

Lai

A Bornean cousin of the durian with vivid orange flesh and — crucially — a far milder smell. Sweet, creamy, and low in the notorious pungency, it's the durian for people who can't abide durian, and a prized fruit of Kalimantan and Sarawak.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Lanzones

Southeast Asia's translucent grape-in-a-jacket — dusty tan clusters hiding segments of sweet-tart, grapefruit-honey flesh. The pride of Camiguin island and Laguna province, celebrated with its own festival.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Lemon

The kitchen's universal acid — a citron-sour orange hybrid whose juice seasons, preserves, tenderizes, and brightens virtually every cuisine on earth. Meyer lemons add a sweeter, floral variation.

Citrus Winter Year-round

Lemon aspen

A pale, marble-sized rainforest fruit from Queensland with an intense lemon-lime-grapefruit flavor — one of the most versatile Australian native "bush tucker" fruits, used in dressings, sauces, drinks, and desserts.

Citrus Autumn Winter

Lilly pilly

A pink-to-magenta, crisp Australian berry from a hugely popular hedge and street tree — tart-sweet with a clove-and-apple tang, made into a sharp, rosy jam and bush-food sauces. The fruit millions of Australians walk past every day.

Berry Summer Autumn

Lime

The tropical acid — sharper and greener-tasting than lemon, indispensable from Mexican taquerías to Thai curries to the world's cocktail shakers. Where the lemon can't grow, the lime rules.

Citrus Year-round

Limequat

A small oval citrus crossing a lime with a kumquat — sharply sour flesh wrapped in a thin, sweet, edible rind, so you can pop the whole fruit at once. A cold-hardy, heavy-bearing hybrid bred in Florida for lime flavor in cooler climates.

Citrus Autumn Winter

Macambo

A large, ridged relative of cacao from the Amazon, with sweet white pulp like its cousin and — unusually — big, edible seeds that are roasted like chestnuts or almonds. An ancient Amazonian crop enjoying a revival as a superfood snack.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Makrut lime

The bumpy, warty lime whose double-lobed leaves perfume tom yum, green curry, and half the kitchens of Southeast Asia. The fruit gives little juice — this is a citrus you cook with, prized for zest and leaf rather than the glass.

Citrus Year-round

Mangosteen

The "Queen of Fruits" — a deep-purple shell that opens to snow-white segments tasting of lychee, peach, and citrus sorbet. Once so coveted Queen Victoria allegedly offered a reward for a fresh one.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Mangrove apple

The sour green fruit of a mangrove tree — flat and cheese-scented, with a tangy pulp made into refreshing juices, sherbets, and sour soups across coastal Southeast Asia. A tidal-forest fruit central to Vietnamese and Indonesian riverside cooking.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Maqui

A tiny, intensely dark-purple berry from the forests of Patagonia — sacred to the Mapuche people, among the most anthocyanin-rich fruits measured, and a rising South American superfruit.

Berry Summer Autumn

Marang

Mindanao's aromatic jackfruit cousin — a bristly green pod that opens to soft, snow-white segments tasting of custard, banana, and pear, with an intense perfume and a short shelf life.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Matoa

A brown-shelled Pacific fruit in the lychee family whose translucent flesh tastes like a mix of rambutan, longan, and coconut. The pride of Papua, gathered from towering rainforest trees across New Guinea and the Pacific islands.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Midyim

A tiny white-and-purple speckled berry from a low Australian coastal shrub — soft, sweet, and gently spicy with a gingery-eucalyptus note. A traditional Aboriginal bush food now popular as a fresh native berry and garnish.

Berry Summer Autumn

Monkey jack

A small, wild jackfruit relative from Southeast Asia — round, rough, and orange-skinned, with sweet-sour deep-orange flesh and crunchy edible seeds. A forest fruit beloved by monkeys and foragers, sharper and smaller than its famous cousins.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Monkey orange

A hard-shelled African savanna fruit like a green cannonball, hiding sweet-sour brown pulp around many seeds. A prized wild food across the bush — but one that must be fully ripe, as the unripe fruit is toxic.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Monstera fruit

Yes — that houseplant. In its native jungles the Swiss-cheese plant bears a scaly green cob that ripens over a full year into flesh tasting of pineapple, banana, and jackfruit. Delicious when ready; needle-sharp punishment when rushed.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Mortiño

A small, dark, wild high-Andean blueberry — sweet-tart and intense, gathered from misty páramo slopes above the treeline. The essential fruit of Ecuador's colada morada, the traditional purple drink of the Day of the Dead.

Berry Autumn

Mountain papaya

A small, fragrant, cold-hardy cousin of the papaya from the high Andes — too astringent to eat raw, but transformed by cooking into some of South America's most beloved preserves, candied sweets, and aromatic drinks.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Muntries

Pea-sized "emu apples" from a ground-hugging vine on South Australia's coast — crisp little berries that taste uncannily of spiced Granny Smith apple with a juniper whisper. A Ngarrindjeri staple turned native-food darling.

Berry Summer Autumn

Nam-nam

A curious Southeast Asian fruit that grows straight from the trunk — wrinkled, kidney-shaped brown pods that look almost brain-like, with crisp sour-sweet flesh eaten fresh with sugar, pickled, or fried into a tangy snack.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Nance

Small golden fruits with a powerful, cheesy-fermented aroma and an oily, sweet-sour flesh — a nostalgic street snack across Mexico and Central America, sold in syrup or with chili and salt.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Naranjilla

The Andes' "little orange" — a fuzzy orange fruit with electric-green, intensely tangy pulp that makes one of South America's most refreshing juices, rhubarb-meets-lime-meets-pineapple in a glass.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Natal plum

A crimson, plum-shaped South African fruit with a sweet-tart, cranberry-strawberry flavor and soft red flesh — eaten fresh and made into a ruby jam. A thorny, salt-tolerant coastal hedge whose milky-sapped unripe fruit ripens into a genuine treat.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Native cherry

An Australian "cherry" that wears its seed on the outside — the sweet, edible part is a swollen red-to-purple stalk, with the single seed sitting on top. A curious sandalwood relative and traditional Aboriginal food, from a tree that grows half-parasitically on the roots of others.

Berry Summer Autumn

Native tamarind

An Australian rainforest fruit whose capsules split to reveal seeds wrapped in bright orange, intensely tart flesh — a native souring fruit used in drinks, sauces, and jams, and a lychee-family relative despite its tamarind-like tang.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Noni

A knobbly, pale, pungent tropical fruit famous less for flavor than for its potent smell and its reputation as a Polynesian and Southeast Asian medicine. A hardy pioneer plant whose fermented juice became a global health fad.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Olive

The Mediterranean's most consequential fruit — far too bitter to eat off the tree, so the world learned to cure it in brine or press it for oil. A drupe that shaped whole cuisines and economies.

Stone fruit Autumn Winter

Otaheite gooseberry

Pale ribbed fruit that dangles in grape-like ropes straight from the branch, sharp enough to make lemons nervous. A tropical dooryard tree from India to the Caribbean, grown for pickles, candy, and blush-pink syrups rather than fresh eating.

Berry Spring Autumn

Pandanus fruit

The large, segmented orange-red fruit of the coastal screwpine — a spiky ball of wedge-shaped "keys" chewed and juiced across the Pacific and eaten cooked as a staple in Micronesia. A canoe plant of many uses, from famine food to the aroma of Southeast Asian cooking.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Papaya

A soft, sunset-orange melon-like fruit that grows like a palm-tree lantern — gentle, musky sweetness, legendary digestive enzymes, and a green unripe stage that's a vegetable in its own right.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Passion fruit

The loudest flavor per gram in the fruit kingdom — a wrinkled shell of golden pulp whose tropical-tart perfume can season a whole cake with one spoonful. Wrinkles mean ready, not ruined.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Patawá

A stately Amazonian palm whose purple-black fruit yields a rich, protein-heavy "milk" and a fine oil so like olive oil that it has been proposed as a substitute. Drunk as a nourishing beverage across the Amazon, it is açaí's oilier, more sustaining cousin.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Peach palm

A fruit you boil, not bite — the orange-red fruit of a spiny Central and South American palm, cooked in salted water until its dense flesh eats like a cross between chestnut and buttered potato. A pre-Columbian staple sold from street carts across the tropics.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Pear

The apple's silkier cousin — buttery, perfumed flesh that ripens from the inside out and rewards patience like few other fruits. Asian pears add a crisp, juicy alternate personality.

Pome Autumn Winter

Pepino

A mild, mellow Andean fruit that looks like a purple-streaked golden egg and tastes like a cross between honeydew and cucumber — refreshing, low-sugar, and eaten like a melon.

Melon Summer Autumn

Pineapple

A South American bromeliad that became the crown of tropical fruit — literally the symbol of hospitality. Sweet-sharp golden flesh, a protein-eating enzyme, and a Philippine export empire.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Year-round

Plum

The most varied stone fruit — from candy-sweet Japanese hybrids to honeyed greengages to tart damsons — plus a second life as the prune, the fruit world's most rehabilitated dried good.

Stone fruit Summer Autumn

Prickly pear

The cactus orchard's candy — neon-fleshed fruit off the nopal paddle, tasting of watermelon and bubblegum, armed with invisible hairline spines that demand respect and tongs.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Pulasan

Rambutan's sweeter, richer cousin — a dark-red fruit covered in short, thick, blunt spines, with juicy translucent flesh that pulls cleanly from the seed.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Quince

The golden, perfumed ancestor of marmalade — rock-hard and astringent raw, but cooked it turns rose-pink, silky, and intensely aromatic. The most transformative fruit in the kitchen.

Pome Autumn

Rambutan

A lychee cousin in a wild red-and-green hairy shell — sweet, floral, grape-like flesh that makes it Southeast Asia's most fun fruit to peel.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn

Raspberry

The most perfumed berry — a hollow crown of drupelets with huge flavor, huge fiber, remarkably little sugar, and a shelf life measured in hours. Eat them the day you meet them.

Berry Summer Autumn

Rosehip

The scarlet fruit of the wild rose, one of the richest natural sources of vitamin C — made into syrup, jam, and tea across Europe, and famously bottled as rosehip syrup to keep children healthy in wartime Britain.

Berry Autumn

Rukam

A round red-to-purple fruit of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, crisp and sweet-tart when ripe, astringent before — traditionally rolled between the palms to tame it. A hardy dooryard fruit eaten fresh, stewed, and pickled.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Safou

Central Africa's "butterfruit" — a glossy indigo fruit that roasts into something like warm, tangy avocado butter. Eaten with grilled corn on a million street corners, it's a savory fruit that behaves like a vegetable and nourishes like a meal.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Salak

The snake fruit — a fig-sized teardrop wrapped in genuine reptile-pattern scales, hiding crisp ivory lobes that taste of pineapple, pear, and something fermented-honeyed. Indonesia's spikiest handshake.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round Summer

Santol

The cotton fruit — a golden tennis ball whose sour rind hides sweet, cottony white segments you suck rather than chew. A Filipino and Thai backyard classic with a serious don't-swallow-the-seed rule.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Sapucaia

A Brazilian rainforest tree whose woody, pot-shaped fruit pops off its own lid to drop rich, creamy nuts — the "paradise nut," rated even finer than the Brazil nut. The emptied urn-like pods, called monkey pots, are a curiosity in their own right.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Satsuma

The seedless, loose-skinned mandarin of Japanese winters — sweet, easy to peel by hand, and hardy enough to grow where other citrus can't. Japan's beloved kotatsu-side mikan and the American South's Christmas orange.

Citrus Autumn Winter

Snot apple

An unglamorously-named but beloved southern African fruit — a woody capsule whose sticky, mucilaginous flesh is chewed for its sweetness like natural gum. A hardy savanna tree fruit and a cherished childhood snack across the region, mucus-like texture and all.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Sour plum

A bright red-to-orange African fruit as sharply sour as its name promises — thin-fleshed, tart, and refreshing, gathered from thorny savanna shrubs and made into juices, jams, and drinks, with a prized oil pressed from its seed.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Soursop

The tropics' creamiest sour fruit — a spiky green giant whose white pulp tastes like strawberry-pineapple custard with citrus lightning. The soul of Latin sorbets and Filipino juice stands alike.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Starfruit

The fruit that slices into stars — waxy golden ridges, crisp grape-citrus flesh, and zero prep beyond a knife. A garnish celebrity that's genuinely good eating, with one serious kidney-health caveat.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Sugar palm fruit

The translucent, chewy seed-fruit of the sugar palm — sold as kaong or kolang-kaling, boiled and sweetened for halo-halo and festive sweets across Southeast Asia. The same palm gives one of the region's finest sugars.

Tropical & subtropical Year-round

Sugar-apple

The knobby little custard grenade — scaly segments that pull apart into spoonfuls of perfumed, pear-custard sweetness around slick black seeds. The Philippines' beloved atis, best eaten with your hands.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Tamarillo

An egg-shaped, jewel-toned relative of the tomato — tangy, savoury-sweet flesh with an edible skin best peeled, eaten spooned from the shell or cooked into chutneys across the Andes and New Zealand.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Tampoi

A round, velvety brown-to-pink fruit of the Bornean rainforest — crack the thick rind and translucent white or yellow segments spill out, sweet-sour and juicy like a larger, richer rambai. A cherished wild and dooryard fruit of the Malay world.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Tropical almond

The flat, almond-shaped fruit of a sprawling tropical beach tree — a thin layer of sweet-sour flesh over a hard stone whose kernel tastes just like an almond. A pantropical shade tree whose fruit is a nostalgic childhood forage across the tropics.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Tucumã

A vivid orange Amazonian palm fruit with dense, fibrous, oil-rich flesh — the beloved filling of Manaus's iconic X-caboquinho sandwich. Intensely carotene-rich, mildly savory-sweet, and eaten with tapioca and cheese across the Brazilian Amazon.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Ugni

A tiny maroon berry with an outsized aroma — sweet-tart and perfumed with strawberry, guava, and bubblegum — foraged in Chile and famous as Queen Victoria's reputed favourite fruit.

Berry Autumn

Umari

An Amazonian fruit with buttery, oily, yellow-orange flesh so rich it's spread on bread like butter — aromatic and savory-sweet, eaten with cassava across the western Amazon. A "vegetable butter" of the rainforest, unique and little-known beyond it.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Velvet tamarind

A small, hard-shelled black fruit that cracks to reveal a thin coat of orange-brown, powdery, sweet-sour pulp around a seed — a beloved snack across West Africa and Southeast Asia, sold by the bagful and sucked like a natural sweet-tart candy.

Tropical & subtropical Autumn Winter

Wild custard apple

Africa's own member of the custard-apple family — a small, lumpy fruit that ripens from green to orange, with sweet, fragrant, pineapple-and-apricot flesh. A beloved wild food of the savanna, gathered by children across the continent.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Wild medlar

A round, apple-brown African fruit whose soft ripe pulp tastes of dried apple and dates — a beloved savanna snack across southern Africa, gathered from the wild, eaten fresh, and brewed into a traditional drink. No relation to the European medlar it resembles.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

Yellow mombin

A small, tart, golden tropical fruit in the mango family — cajá to Brazilians, hog plum to the Caribbean — whose intensely aromatic pulp makes some of Latin America's most beloved juices, ice creams, and cocktails.

Tropical & subtropical Summer Autumn

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