If you don’t live in South East Asia, then you may have very likely missed one of the most delicious fruits available on trees. It’s called the pomela and the first time I saw one, I thought it was a slightly greenish grapefruit on steroids; a genetically engineering fruit gone amok. Of course, never one to be deterred by chemicals in food, I bought one and took it home.

Once I got it home I left it on the counter for about two weeks and I just looked at it. It might as well have been a piece of art rather than food.

Finally, and rather embarrassed, I asked a friend who lived in Israel much longer, what I should do with my pomela. “Well, you could eat it,” she said. I knew that, but the real question was, “how?”.

It’s easy to think you are worldly when you live in the same world your entire life. The real challenge is when you leave your comfort zone in search of new experiences. While my friend was probably surprised by my lack of fruit expertise, she simply asked for a knife and made one big cut through the circumference of the pomela. The she turned it about 90 degrees and cut the circumference from that direction as well.

When she peeled back the skin it was thick and foamy — approximately an inch and a half thick, maybe two inches.

The next step involved removing all the layers of skin off before proceeding to eat the pomela. It’s sort of like removing the epidermis, the dermis and the sub-dermis, and it takes about as long.

When you reach the filmy, sub-dermis membrane you have to slowly peel it away from each and every wedge. The exact opposite of how one eats an orange. With an orange, you eat that filmy membrane layer covering the actual citrus flesh. With a pomela, you do not.

The trick is to remove the entire wedge in tact. This is difficult when the fruit is really ripe and the goal is to simply get to the fruit inside. The pomela tastes like a happy grapefruit; it doesn’t have that little edge of bitterness commonly associated with grapefruits.

A few years ago there was some medical breakthrough news that mentioned the cancer-fighting attributes of pomelas. Unfortunately, I could not find the attributed source. However, for most people that is not what is truly important — it would just be an added benefit.

What does matter is that according to Wikipedia www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomelo it is the largest type of citrus fruit available and somewhere out there, someone has managed to grow one the size of a basketball. Now that is something I want to see.