MySpace-March 9, 2010-En-Durian-ce

I’m known for being a picky eater. I don’t think that judgment is very fair. Its more that I am very vocal about what I will and will not eat. I don’t like gravy. I don’t like eggs (mainly because I can taste/smell the sulfur in them. I am very sensitive to metallic smells such as in large quantities of muscle, organs or blood. ) I don’t like many vegetables. I blame this one on my mother. BUT I have expanded the vegetables I will eat to include fried green beans, cold peas in ranch dressing, sweet potatoes (baked or fried, never with marshmallows) and spinach when its well hidden in other things, a trick I often play on myself!

I digress. Joe and I have taken to challenging ourselves with strange foods and strange food combinations that may or may not often involve bacon, such as bacon donuts or the bacon candy bar. Joe and I went to the Korean/Japanese place and I loved kim chee, but my ‘Japanese’ was too American since I’m pretty sure I had a similar meal at Jimmy’s Steak House earlier that week. I’m not above trying strange new foods (like yuck bag). I just like to know what I am getting into. I know that I don’t get into many things that are spicy so Thai and Indian foods are out.

Joe and I had once seen a fruit called durian on the Travel Channel on Bizarre Food. It’s a fruit that is so smelly that it is banned from hotels and buses. Apparently, it smells like feet and tastes like cheese. Apparently, it has, because of its prickly, hard outer shell (?), been used as a weapon and has killed people. We would talk about durian every once in a while though I am uncertain of in what context.

Somehow, after about a week of my absence to California, Joe took a journey to the Asian market. There he purchased a durian, which was frozen whole. Additionally, he purchased a packet of sheep meat that was unrefrigerated (the translation was pretty poor, but funny! I wish I remembered what it said but one direction included ‘with as much water as you wish’.), some real Ramen noodles, a jar of mudfish (which looks like mud) and some other things.  He was scheduled to eat said durian during my absence but the guy that also wanted to try it chopped off a finger in a car door. So he couldn’t come. Lucky for me, this meant a half rotten (possibly, who could tell?) durian thawing in the refrigerator for me upon my return.

Let me describe the durian for you. It’s a light brown tan color. Its roughly the size of your head. It is covered in sharp spikes about an inch long. It is sort of shaped like a peach with a more pointy end and a crease down it.

It didn’t really smell. My house seemed durian free. Even up close, it didn’t smell. I think it was because it was frozen. THEN Joe chopped into it. At first, I questioned if it wasn’t something burning in the oven because Joe and I tend to spill things under burners and don’t pick them up.  (Okay, its mostly me.) Then it quite clearly was coming from the durian. It quite clearly was a smell that didn’t belong naturally on this earth.

Once the durian had reached two halves, Joe and I set about eating it as I photographed and videotaped the event. Joe took a fairly good sized bite and made yuck face. (The videos of both of us eating it is on my facebook site.) He repeated the process for another video and in this one described it as ‘caseous’ which in medical terms means ‘cheesy pus’. I took a tiny wimpy bite and tried not throwing up. Joe and I discussed the various qualities of the fruit-how if it hadn’t been cold, it might have been improved, how it tasted like sweet onions, how it had the texture of cream cheese-like the really good stuff that’s in Danish. We thought that if one of these qualities had been eliminated from the picture, our brains may have been able to override the vomit thought a little harder. (No one threw up luckily during this durian experiment. The dogs wouldn’t even come into the kitchen for a taste and they want everything we’re eating. Except apparently, durian.)

Now we were faced with the fact that we had a ten pound fruit that smelled horrible and tasted like sweet onions. Joe somehow had the idea to make a cake out of it. I can only assume that he had found out about durian cake while doing some research on the fruit. So Joe scraped out the stuff, I complained and we saved the durian for the next day.

The next day, after doing some converting of grams over to cups and doubling the recipe, Joe and I made a cake out of the durian. Joe mashed the smelly fruit. It was somewhat the consistency of mashed bananas. Once added to the cake batter (to which I added vanilla because I wanted to and I had seen it in another recipe), the smell of the durian had turned down a notch or two. We kidded that our appliances were questioning what they had done in a former life to deserve such treatment. After a final mixing, I offered Joe the beaters to lick off. I really meant it and didn’t think about them having gross durian on them. He refused. We laughed and put the two cakes in the oven.

Somewhere along the line, I thought that perhaps icing the cake would cause it to become more appealing and by more appealing I think I really meant-edible. I mixed up some cream cheese frosting, appropriate I now think because of the texture of the fruit in the cake it was covering. How did I decide on cream cheese? I think I was still stuck on bananas since really the cake looked pretty close to banana cake. Forty-five minutes later and the cake comes out of the oven, golden brown and only mildly smelly. Our house smelled sort of okay. Sort of not.

Joe would ice the cake and take it to work. I think he advertised it as it was-being a durian cake. To which, the Cambodian population was all over it. By midnight, it was at least half gone. By 3am, it was gone and the plate that it came on was washed. Joe said some little lady (that I can only assume to be Cambodian) came up and complimented him on the texture. Needless to say, Joe and I make one mean durian cake! I told him it was the frosting. Frosting, like bacon, makes everything better.

In conclusion, we tried durian. We will not try it again. We also would win in a Cambodian bake off by entering our durian cake. Where and when this will happen is yet to be decided but I can safely say that it won’t be in our apartment. Durian is hence forth banned from our apartment like many an Asian bus or hotel…I’ll go someplace else and bake that cake. Amberle, can I borrow your kitchen?

[EDIT-Originally, posted to Blogger on March 12, 2011.]