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    Gabriel Sachter-Smith’s Quest for Wild Bananas Around the World

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    Gabriel Sachter-Smith is a banana aficionado who has identified some 500 varieties of banana on expeditions around the tropical world. “It’s like collecting Pokémon,” Mr. Sachter-Smith said at his farm, Hawaii Banana Source, on the North Shore of Oahu. He was walking through rows of young plants, some of the 150 varieties he grows, in a T-shirt splotched with mud and banana sap. His one-eyed dog, Mendel, trotted along at his boots. “My default mode of being alive is ‘What is that banana?’” he said.Mr. Sachter-Smith, 35, caught the banana bug when he was 14, on a trip with his mother to Washington, D.C., where he saw banana plants in her friend’s yard. The friend said they weren’t trees, that she could dig them up for winter, stick them inside and replant them when it warmed. When he returned home to Colorado, he started growing them as house plants. “I was trying to figure out what is a banana plant,” he said. “It’s just been a never-ending quest since then.”Mr. Sachter-Smith left banana-inhospitable Colorado to study tropical plant and soil science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, ultimately earning a master’s degree. His global quest has introduced him to bananas that are egg-shaped and orange, a foot long and pale yellow, sausage-stubby and green. They are eaten fried, roasted, boiled and as is, but also grown for pig feed, decoration and weaving fabric. In Papua New Guinea, where Mr. Sachter-Smith has gone on two expeditions hunting for bananas, their names carry many meanings: “young men” (mero mero), “can feed a whole family” (navotavu), “something that was fought over” (bukatawawe), “breast” (nono).You probably know just one banana: long, yellow, kind of flavorless. You eat it plain, put peanut butter on it, or toss it, overripe, in the freezer to make banana bread someday. (You won’t.) Its name, Cavendish, comes from a 19th-century English duke who was sent a package of the bananas and whose gardener grew them in a greenhouse. The Cavendish now accounts for almost half of all bananas produced globally and nearly all exports. It holds a Guinness World Record as the most eaten fruit.Red bananas in a Sri Lankan market.Anne-Marie Palmer/AlamyThe hairy banana, or pink banana, growing in Assam, India.Florapix/AlamyBut for years, scientists have warned that fungal diseases like black sigatoka and Tropical Race 4 could wipe out this monocrop, just as a fungus annihilated its predecessor, the Gros Michel, in the 1950s and 1960s. Genetic engineering and breeding are the most likely solutions, so scientists have built a stash of backup bananas from around the world, with genes that might someday see action on the global market.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New Zealanders Are Crazy for This Fruit. It’s Not the Kiwi.

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      Autumn in New Zealand heralds the arrival of a green, egg-size fruit that falls off trees in such abundance that it is often given to neighbors and colleagues by the bucket or even the wheelbarrow load. Only in cases of extreme desperation do people buy any.The fresh fruit, whose flesh is gritty, jellylike and cream-colored, is used in muffins, cakes, jams and smoothies, and it begins appearing on high-end menus each March — the start of fall in the Southern Hemisphere. Off-season, it is found in food and drink as varied as juices and wine, yogurt and kombucha, and chocolate and popcorn.This ubiquitous fruit is the feijoa (pronounced fee-jo-ah). Known in the United States as the pineapple guava, it was first brought to New Zealand from South America via France and California in the early 1900s.Its tangy taste is hard to describe, even for die-hard fans. But what is easy to pinpoint is that like the kiwi fruit, which originated in China, and the kiwi, a native bird, the feijoa has become for many here a quintessential symbol of New Zealand, or Aotearoa, as the country is known in the Indigenous Maori language.The feijoa is a quintessential symbol of New Zealand.The flesh is gritty, jellylike and cream-colored.Fresh feijoa is used in muffins, cakes, jams, smoothies and cocktails.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Bumpy Gourd That’s Winning Over Bartenders

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      Austin Hennelly, the 35-year-old bar director at Kato, a Taiwanese restaurant in Los Angeles, likens tasting bitter melon to “going down the drop of a roller coaster.” Sipping the fruit’s juice — which is the star ingredient in his Garden Tonic, a mocktail he considers the best drink on Kato’s menu — is, he says, “a little bit unpleasant and maybe a little bit scary, but it’s exhilarating, and then you just want to do it again.”Bitter melon, which is actually a member of the gourd family, has long been a staple of Asian, African and Caribbean cuisines. The Chinese variety is a luminous cactus green with rounded ends and furrows. The Indian version is darker and covered in jagged spikes. Both types are almost always eaten cooked and have the firm bite of sautéed bell pepper with a grassy taste that gives way to a supremely bitter, medicinal tang — like a pain-relief pill that’s lost its coating. Now, mixologists are harnessing that extreme flavor to add punch and balance to cocktails.Bitter melon (left) is arguably the bitterest food in the world. The Bitter Melon Collins (right) served at COA, a Hong Kong cocktail bar, includes the white variety of the fruit.From left: Getty Images; Courtesy of COA Hong KongAt the Chinese-Irish lounge Jade & Clover in Manhattan’s Chinatown, the Bitter Sweet is a fresher take on the Jungle Bird, a Tiki classic, with bitter melon replacing Campari. “I juice it — skin, seeds and all,” says bartender Gelo Honrade, 40, who blends the slurry with pineapple and orange juices and Mekhong rum. The result: a sweet start followed by a finish reminiscent of cold-pressed kale. Like that of a Negroni, its pungent tail demands another sip to find the sweet hit again.At COA, a cocktail bar in Hong Kong specializing in agave spirits, founder Jay Khan, 38, opts for the less common, slightly mellower white bitter melon in his Bitter Melon Collins. “We want to balance interesting and approachable,” he says. At Rangoon, a Burmese restaurant in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, the chef Myo Moe, 51, muddles slices of Chinese bitter melon in her Satt Kha, a spicy twist on a vodka mule that’s the best-selling drink on the menu. And at Watson in Vancouver, the bar manager, Jordan Coelho, 29, makes his own version of Campari out of dried bitter melon and goji berries for his rum-based riff on a Negroni, the Valley of Fear, which arrives under a cloud of smoked oak.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More