I've seen this fruit many times at the farmer's market, but never gave it a second look due to it's appearance. It just doesn't look appetizing, but decided to give it a try. OMG! It is now one of my favorite fruit.
The Atemoya (aka, ice cream in forest) is a hybrid of the Cherimoya and sugar apple, which are both from the American tropics.
Atemoya is extremely sweet, like eating sugar out of a bowl of cold water. It has a mild flavor of apple or pear. You can taste the flavor as you spoon out the meaty white portion of the fruit, but the brownish edge near the skin of a super rip fruit is like eating moist sugar. It's that sweet. The skin is soft and tasteless, so I mistakenly ate much of it too. The seeds are large and slightly toxic, so do not swallow them.
I planted a few seeds to see what I get. This is a hybrid fruit, so it is best to buy a grafted tree to get fruit true to the mother, but I like experimenting. A grafted Atemoya tree should start to produce fruit in 2-4 years, but when grown from seed may take 5-7 years.
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