I bought a bunch of these for Angel last week and they finally ripened. They’re weird and less of a pain in the ass than the dreaded but delicious cherimoya and they also have this weird quality that make you sort of slightly groggy, a little sleepy, a bit like red wine or hearing someone tell too long a story. We put some in a cocktail last year that I forgot to post about that was actually pretty good. I have the recipe card right here:

Limited Edition

1.5 oz. Mezcal

.75 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

.5 oz. Sapote

.5 oz. Tepache

.5 oz. Agricole

.25 oz. Lime Sherbet

Kombu Salt Rim

I remember this being pretty tasty and weird. There’s no date, gotta start dating these puppies. Ugh. Not sure what some of the ingredients refer to. I’ll take an educated guess on the sapote part of this being some kind of syrup, maybe even part whey? The sapote doesn’t stick around too long once it gets ripe. You’ve got to act fast and if you don’t, it’ll turn brown. The tepache part of the recipe card is also a little vague. There were a few tepaches we had last year if I remember correctly–guava, kiwi, and loquat. Having tepache behind the bar is always a massive pain in the ass. The method I use works 80% of the time, which means about one out of five batches is a total bummer. A lot of it depends on humidity levels. The other annoying thing is a good batch of tepache can take up to ten days to fully ferment and when it does it’s super explosive and the bottles have to be burped twice a day. Yes, I found this out the hard way through many Old Faithful style eruptions in the walk in.

I’ve only ever seen white sapote here in SoCal but there’s many other varieties, the black version supposedly being the tastiest. There’s a weird orange one with only one big black seed in the middle, there’s sapote amarillo…And so on and so forth. They’re all part of the custard fruit family which never really caught on here in the states. Not something you’d see at a Whole Foods anyway but very common at an H-Mart or at Eden Market on Santa Monica Boulevard just a couple miles down from the Canyon. They’re originally a New World item and ranged from southern Texas all the way down to the Brazilian rainforest. Think of all the crazy fruits down there. We only see a smidgen of what’s available. In both Asia and South America there’s just so much we’ve never even seen.

I’ve lumped sapote and cherimoya together in the custard apple family before but this is not accurate. I googled this a few times and got a lot of confusing information about it such as this:

“Cherimoyas are part of the custard apple family that also includes soursop and pawpaw but is not, in fact, a custard apple. Although they are often called by the same name, the cherimoya, Annona cherimola, is different from and considered by many to be superior in taste to the custard apple, Annona reticulata.”

Uh, ok. Part of the family but not considered part of the name? Sort of like a red headed step child I guess. If you google cherimoya it’ll tell you it’s part of the custard apple clan. I don’t know. I don’t think it really even matters. It’s also telling me white sapote isn’t even a sapote. Ok. Then why call it that in the first place? Call it something else. I’m not sure why I even care. Curiosity can be annoying because now I want to try a real sapote and a real custard fruit, neither of which I’ve ever had access to. Hmm. There’s an H-Mart close to here. Proximity to Koreatown is quite nice.