CORAL GABLES, Fla. — Chocolate pudding fruit: The name sounded promising. And the mushy brown flesh did somewhat resemble that childhood snack. But when I asked Roger Blanco, my guide at Fruit and Spice Park near Homestead, Fla., whether the fruit really tasted like chocolate, he shook his head regretfully. “Not that much,” he said.
I took a bite. Roger was right. Chocolate pudding fruit, or black sapote, is mildly sweet, but I couldn’t detect any chocolate flavor.
Everyone knows that Florida grows fruit: It produces about 70 percent of U.S. oranges and grapefruit, according to the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. But growers here in the Redland agricultural area near Homestead also cultivate smaller quantities of less-well-known fruits, some of which don’t grow anywhere else in the continental United States: carambola (star fruit), mamey, sapodilla, jackfruit, litchi and many others.
The Redland area — named for its red clay — is “a little climatic jewel” that stretches between the Everglades and Biscayne Bay, says Chris Rollins, who has been director of Fruit and Spice Park for 30 years.
Browsing the park’s website on a gray November day, I’d had visions of sipping fresh-squeezed juice in the sunshine and decided to make a trip to the Redland area the next time I was in Miami. So on a 75-degree day in mid-January, my husband and I headed to the Redlands, making a warm-up stop first at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables.
The 83-acre garden’s walking paths wind among lakes, tropical flowers, palm trees and other plants. But our destination was a small greenhouse at one end of the park. The Whitman Tropical Fruit Pavilion houses a display of fruit species from around the world — mangosteen, durian, rambutan and many others — with informative signs describing their origins.
Without a guide, though, it was hard to find the fruit on the mostly bare trees and bushes. (This was our first clue that perhaps January was not the best time to take a tropical fruit tour, even in South Florida.)
Luckily, the outdoor “edible garden” next door proved more accessible. The Fairchild runs a farm in the Redland area that houses an extensive seed collection and hosts fruit research and public education programs. The farm also supplies the raw materials for two weekend-only smoothie bars, one at the farm and one at the main garden. Taylor Carman, the helpful smoothie maker behind the bar, showed us around the small outdoor garden and gave us a few tastes of in-season fruit there: a super-sweet, cinnamony sapodilla and a bright yellow canistel (also called eggfruit).
Half an hour later, we found ourselves making a quick transition from the strip malls and gas stations of suburban Miami to acres of avocado orchards. In the middle of them sits Fruit and Spice Park, on 37 acres of land purchased by Miami-Dade County in 1944 to build an educational botanical garden.
The park “is really a reflection of the community,” Rollins says. “The very first European inhabitants here, around 1900, the first thing they did was plant guavas, mangos, avocados.”
Today, avocados are the biggest commercial crop grown nearby, covering nearly 8,000 acres, according to Rollins. Growers also produce smaller numbers of longan, litchi, sapodilla, mamey, star fruit and other exotic tropical fruits, which they ship to specialty markets, resort chefs and ethnic grocery stores across the country.
Fruit and Spice Park displays all those locally grown crops, and much more — more than 500 types of fruit and spice plants from all parts of the tropics, including 150 varieties of mango and 70 types of bananas. The park gets visitors from around the world — many of them immigrants who have settled in the Miami area — and “in the summertime, we can tell where someone’s from by the mango they ask for,” Rollins says.
The Details
Info:
Stay: Hampton Inn & Suites Miami-South/Homestead, 2855 NE Ninth St., Homestead, 305-257-7000, . Rooms from $179, including breakfast.
Dine/Drink: Mango Cafe, 24801 SW 187th Ave., Homestead, 305-247-5727, . Fruit and Spice Park’s on-site cafe offers salads, wraps, pizza and a fruit plate consisting of fruit grown on the premises. Entrees $8-$10
Do: The Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, 10901 Old Cutler Road, Coral Gables, 305-667-1651, . Eighty-three acres of paths, ponds and plants. Includes the Whitman Tropical Fruit Pavilion as well as a butterfly garden, outdoor sculptures and other attractions. 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily. Adults $25, seniors $18, children $12.
Fruit and Spice Park, 24801 SW 187th Ave., Homestead, 305-247-5727, . Take a guided tram tour or wander on your own. No fruit picking allowed, but sampling fallen fruit is okay. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Adults $8, children $2.
Robert Is Here, 19200 SW 344th St., Homestead, 305-246-1592, . Fifty-year-old family-run fruit stand and tourist attraction offers a petting zoo and playground in addition to selling fresh produce and homemade milkshakes. Special to The Washington Post
