Loquat

I'd never tasted a loquat until last year, in fact, I'd never heard of a loquat until last year, which is when the Walkers brought us some. 

I was bowled over. They were juicy and very sweet. Where had these been all my life? We were at the Walkers earlier this week and got to pick some loquats from their trees. Nice reunion. The loquat is indigenous to southeastern China and is also known as the Japanese medlar, Japanese plum and Chinese plum. Loquat fruit are yellow or orange, or red-blushed, depending on the cultivar. The Walkers have two trees, one producing orange fruit and one producing yellow fruit. 

Their orange fruit are quite a bit bigger than the yellow fruit. 

The fruit have a very thin skin 

that can be peeled easily when the fruit is ripe. 

The flesh beneath the skin can be white, yellow or orange. 

The flesh of the ones I got mimicked the skin: yellow with yellow and orange with orange. I found the taste to vary between the orange and yellow quite dramatically. Both were very juicy, but the orange was quite sweet, with a little citrusy tang and Wikipedia is probably not wrong when it says "a mix of peach...and mild mango." The yellow fruit varied quite a bit, some quite sour and some only a little sour, but all with at least a goodly bit of it and some tang. 

It is one of the 1001 Foods You Must Taste Before You Die and 1001 compares the taste to apricot, but "different - both juicier and sharper." Each fruit has five ovules 

and one to five of them mature into large brown seeds. 

I found between two and five seeds in the ones I ate. Because it bruises easily and does not transport well, it is hard to find in stores. From southeast Asia, it was introduced to Japan over 1,000 years ago. It has spread to India, the Mediterranean Basin, Pakistan and Hawaii. It is now cultivated as well in northern South America, Central America and Mexico to California.