I Bet you've never seen a cashew fruit?

in #foraging8 years ago

I love cashew nuts, it's one of my favourite healthy snacks, I could eat a whole bag of cashews in just a few minutes, the other day I was looking up the origins of the cashew nut and I was quite surprised to see that the cashew nut comes from a fruit called the cashew apple

The cashew apple grows on the cashew tree in the northeastern part of brazil, the fruit itself is said to be very sweet, but the skin covering the fruit is also very delicate which makes it not an easy one to transport over long distances, in Brazil these apples are used to make a popular refreshing juice drink.

Now can you imagine from that one bag of cashews you ate each single nut was the product of a single fruit? how many fruits did it take to fill up that bag of nuts? I'm adding a few more interesting photo's around the cashew fruit and cashew nut in case you were as surprised as I was to learn this. Enjoy

Hope you've found a new appreciation for these tasty little nuts.

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We have a lot of these here in Brazil, specially in the northeast

do you ever eat the apples just like that from the tree?

yes, and it is delitious. We love to make juice with them .

I would love to taste it one day, unfortunately they cant transport them so I'll have to go to Brazil, its on my list already :)

Come to northeast brazil. This region is very plenty of cashew fruits. And in the federal state of Rio Grande do Norte in Pirangi we have the biggest cashew tree of the world.

http://www.natal-brazil.com/entertainment/cashew-tree.html

WOW! I'm definitely going there, cashews everywhere! you know how expensive those nuts are in the UK? like 5 USD for a tiny 200g bag

Actually the nut is the fruit, the apple is actually a swolen stalk of the nut. It is not really sweet in fact it has an acrid but pleasant taste, in fact I find when I eat one I need to eat more. Also if you get a few drops on your clothes they will leave a stain that will be very difficult to remove. It is very juicy and very refreshing.

Great info thank you, it looks very similar to an apple so its so interesting that the apple isn't actually the fruit.