Skip to main content

Buah Tarap: A chance encounter

You learn something new everyday. My friend Alina is very fond of repeating this. And I agree with her.

Today I tasted the Buah Tarap (Tarap Fruit) which is said to be unique to Sabah/Borneo.

My colleagues and I arrived in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah this afternoon; we are here for the RHB New Straits Times Spell-It-Right Challenge which will take place at the Suria Mall over the weekend.

After checking into the Beverly Hotel we walked to a nearby eatery for a spot of tea. It was then that I chanced upon the Buah Tarap and began snapping away.

My colleague, who had eaten the fruit in Bandung, Indonesia, was excited to see it. He bought one for us to try.

The stall vendor split the fruit into two and we bit into its flesh. Everyone liked it but describing its flavour remains a challenge.

The fruit, which looks like nangka (jackfruit) or chempedak,  has an unusual combination of tastes: it is sweet but not as sweet as the jackfruit nor as chunky. Words fail me.

It feels so light that you want to have more of it.

This is how the exterior of the Buah Tarap looks like.

Close up of the fruit's skin.

Notice the fruit's striking similarity to the jackfruit.


This fruit should be on everyone's 'must try' list.
Labels:
Location: Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia

Comments

Pamela Yeoh said…
a delighting fruit.
20 October 2010 at 17:24
FAEZAH ISMAIL said…
yes, it is ... wish i could find it in the peninsula ...
24 October 2010 at 08:15
Anonymous said…
bungkus two bound for KL:}
21 December 2011 at 11:33
warisan etnobotani said…
Buah Tarap.....Buah Terap Kelantan said...
11 April 2012 at 23:18
Sofia L said…
Nice blog thaanks for posting
15 July 2022 at 21:00
Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Why Shamsul Amri dislikes Facebook

Professor Shamsul Amri Baharuddin People who do not use Facebook fall into three broad categories. The first group is completely indifferent to it, the second finds it mildly irritating and the third dislikes it intensely. Malaysia's prominent sociologist Professor Shamsul Amri Baharuddin is of the last type. I made the mistake of asking Shamsul, who is director of the Institute of Ethnic Studies at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, if he was on Facebook, the social network which was hatched up in the dormitories of Harvard six years ago. "I have a face and I keep thousands of books. Why do I need Facebook?" How do you react to that reply? I didn't. I meekly invited him to elaborate on his reasons. "Facebook will take away my soul and I won't allow that to happen because I am a believer," says Shamsul fiercely, who launched into a tirade of accusations against Facebook. Ninety per cent of the things you read on Facebook are either p...
7 comments
Read more

When a card came out of the blue ...

This post is prompted by a remark made by my good friend Wei Lin. She saw me reading a card I had received from a friend recently and said: "Traditional cards are so old-fashioned." I wondered if that was true and decided to probe into the issue. A Google search revealed numerous articles on the debate between traditional paper-based cards and e-cards. Tracey Grady's examination of the pros and cons of each type is informative. In my opinion, e-cards are not substitutes for the real (traditional) ones and they shouldn't be. I treat e-card e-mails with suspicion because spammers could be using them to download viruses and software onto my computer. I have never sent anyone an e-card and I don't plan to; I dislike the cold impersonality of conveying greetings electronically. I have always liked sending and receiving cards the traditional way. The ritual of going to a bookshop, browsing at the card section, picking a suitable one for the recipient and then walking to...
7 comments
Read more

In the waiting room

People are always waiting for something. They could be waiting for the train, an opportunity, promises to be fulfilled or the return of a loved one. But "what does waiting mean in our lives and what is life without waiting?" That question was posed by Danny Castillones Sillada in his article "What is Life without Waiting?" (The Metaphysics of Waiting). The passing of the old year demands another round of gloomy introspection and Sillada's article came at the right time, given the value of waiting in our lives. "Waiting," he explains, is "an emotional and mental state, which is preconditioned to anticipate someone or something to arrive at a particular time and place". Sillada tells us that there are two types of waiting: empirical and metaphysical. The empirical form of waiting is "where the certainty of the waited and the occurrence of event are tangibly expected to happen within a particular time and place of the waite...
5 comments
Read more