Custard Apple in Thai Cooking

Custard apple, or sugar apple, is a round green fruit covered in knobbly segments. When ripe, it pulls apart easily to reveal creamy, sweet, white flesh around shiny black seeds. Thailand grows a lot of it in the dry northeast, especially Nakhon Ratchasima.

Pronunciation	noi naa
Flavour	Creamy, sweet and fragrant, like vanilla custard
Season	June to September
Eaten	Fresh, pulled apart by hand

How to eat it

Pull the ripe fruit apart with your hands, then eat the creamy segments one at a time, spitting out the seeds. The seeds are toxic if crushed and should never be eaten.

Choosing and storing

Choose fruit whose segments are starting to separate, with pale creamy lines between them, and that gives when pressed. Hard fruit ripens at room temperature in two to three days. Once ripe, eat it quickly; it bruises easily.

Varieties

Noi na fai: the traditional Thai favourite, with deep ridges, thin skin and very soft, intensely sweet flesh that almost melts.
Noi na nang: smoother and thicker-skinned, with firmer, slightly chewy flesh and a faint tartness. It travels better and bruises less.

In Thai markets

The main growing area is around Pak Chong in Nakhon Ratchasima, on the road up to Khao Yai, where roadside stalls sell boxes of fruit in season. In Bangkok they turn up on fruit carts and in markets from early in the rainy season, usually sold by the kilo and often slightly underripe so they survive the journey home.

Outside Thailand

Look for sugar apples in Asian, Indian and Caribbean grocers. In British supermarkets the label custard apple is often used for cherimoya or atemoya, which are larger, smoother-skinned relatives with a similar creamy flesh. Frozen pulp is sold in some Asian and Latin American shops and works well in shakes.

Cook’s tip
Chill a ripe custard apple and eat it with a spoon straight from the shell. It is like eating ice cream.

How to eat it

Choosing and storing

Varieties

In Thai markets

Outside Thailand

More Fruits