Three exotic fruits you must try before you die

Durian is a strange, bumpy-skinned thing known as "the King of Fruits", and notorious for its odd spiny shape and pungent smell. You really have to try one to appreciate its exquisite flavour.

The durian tree towers as high as 40m in the jungle rainforest and seed trees take 8-10 years to fruit. It's worth the wait!

Durian fruit is very low in cholesterol and sodium, and is a good source of thiamin, vitamin B6 and manganese. It's also packed to the spines with vitamin C.

The Smell!
Orangutans love durian, they don't mind the whiffy aroma (some people could say durians stink) for the smell means nothing when it comes to chomping into a beautiful tasty durian. It amazes me how any human came to eat a durian in the first place - it must have been for a bet! - for once cut open, the fruit smells absolutely frightful. And I mean absolutely!

Many hotels ban tourists from taking durian to their rooms. That's how bad it smells. The trick is to eat it fast! You have about 10 minutes before the rotten smell gets too much. (You can devour a durian in less than 5 minutes if you really set your mind to it).

If you're brave enough to battle through you will be rewarded with an unbelievable creamy, custardy taste of honey and cream in a vanilla and butterscotch pudding.

To determine if durian fruit is ripe, people smell the bottom of the stem. If the smell is strong, it's ready to eat. By the time a durian has been exported and reached you, the stem smell has faded, and you would then use the tapping method.

This is achieved by hitting the fruit with a stick and listening for a slightly-hollow "thunk".

Wipe down your largest chopping board or lay a newspaper out on the floor and chop the durian in half using a cleaver. It opens to reveal four seeds covered in pale yellow flesh. You dig out a giant seed and proceed to suck the creamy flesh. Beware, it's very sweet, very filling, and you don't have much time!

Another fruit with a prickly outside, jackfruit looks a bit like durian in a large economy size. It's also a little bit on the nose.

The jackfruit is indigenous to India, but spread early throughout Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and now grows in northern Australia.

The amazing jackfruit tree, a cousin of the breadfruit and of the tiny mulberry, bears the largest tree-borne fruit in the world. A single fruit can weigh as much as 36 kilograms and be a metre long and 75 centimeters in diameter.

To bear this weight, the flowers and fruits of jackfruit don't grow on branches but grow directly on the tree forks or tree trunks.

Crack open a jackfruit and you will find the pods or "bulbs". We call them the seeds in Australia, but they are actually a kind of fleshy covering for the true seeds or pits, which are round and dark like chestnuts.

Jackfruit can be eaten green, cooked in various forms, as well as eaten ripe. The fruit has a creamy sweetness with hints of pineapple and banana. The seeds, with their nutty taste and texture, are just gorgeous.

Jackfruit is very similar in texture to chicken, making an excellent vegetarian substitute for meat.

If durian is the King of Fruits, then mangosteen is the Queen. Mangosteen is round and purple, somewhat smaller than a tennis ball. To eat it, you can crush the brittle yet moist rind with your palms to reveal the pure-white delicacy inside. The bitter rind is inedible, and the fruit comes in the form of variously sized wedged segments, the largest of which may hold a solitary seed.

It is said that Queen Victoria offered knighthood to any subject who could bring her a mangosteen fruit in prime condition. Sadly, because of the impossibility of preserving the fruit during the weeks-long journey no one received the prize. It's been suggested that, thanks to the Queen's quest, the fruit achieved the title of "Queen of Fruits," but mangosteen lovers will tell you it has nothing to do with Victoria and everything to do with its taste.

The mangosteen tastes more like icecream than anything else besides icecream. However, it's the flavours of the icecream that change!

Sometimes a mangosteen can taste like strawberry icecream, sometimes vanilla. And sometimes you would swear you are eating a peach. Whatever the individual taste of each fruit, it's delicate and divine.

I sympathise with anyone who can't get a fresh mangosteen.

Lensmaster taryneast passes on a handy tip ........

How to tell if a Mangosteen is ripe - I learned this is Thailand. If it's solid as a rock it's not ripe. You want one that has a peel that you can press your thumb into.

Xanthones are powerful phytonutrients found in few plants and are composed of stable carbon-structure molecules. If that barely means anything, it's easier to say that xanthones have been demonstrated to be effective in inhibiting inflammation as well as being potent antioxidants in combating free radical damage.

There are about 200 xanthones found in nature, 43 of which are found in the mangosteen fruit alone. The mangosteen fruit is believed to contain one of the highest concentrations of xanthones in any one edible source.

Because of these xanthones, a few mangosteens daily are said to

* promote a healthy respiratory system
* strengthen the immune system
* support cartilage and joint function
* maintains intestinal health
* neutralises free radicals

I'm not a scientist, I can't say this is what they do, I eat mangosteens because they taste so good.

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