#ebenaceae

Cacao fruit, dark brown cacao seeds with lighter black sapote seeds, and black sapote fruit.

The cacao pulp tastes a bit like a less complex lychee; it's wrapped tightly to the seed, though once you've broken through the tough skin below the pulp, you can peel it off fairly easily. The pulp is very slippery, so I recommend removing as much as you can before attempting to peel them. For purposes of making chocolate, however, the pulp is left on the seeds to ferment. I'm trying fermentation with fruit from 2 of the 3 pods I had. I'm not sure I have enough to get a good ferment going (heat generated during the process is critical), but we'll see what happens over the next few days.

Black sapote is actually a persimmon, Diospyros nigra. (It's actually less black than our native Texas persimmon, Diospyros texana.) Despite sometimes being advertised as chocolate pudding fruit, it has a mild, non-acidic, non-descript sweet flavor and creamy texture. Despite arriving firm, two of the fruits ripened literally overnight and the others followed soon after. If you ever order any, you better have a plan about what you want to do with them, because they're not small and they won't keep long without some form of processing.