We’re about half way thru mango season and I’m still baffled by all the variety here. In New York, all I remember seeing (even in the Indian markets) were the famous Alphonso mangos. I guess they must travel the best.
Here the variety is endless. Everyone has a fave variety — which often correlates to what was grown in their hometown. The north thinks they have best mangos as the heat makes them sweeter (or so we were told during our recent visit to Lucknow). The south thinks their mangos are better because of the early rains. One friend still has her father ship her crates of mangos from their hometown — because nothing else can compare.
Of course, once you dice up the ripe ones, it’s hard to tell the comma shaped fruit with the lovely peach skin from the round bright yellow one from the red/gold/green oval one — they are all brilliant yellowy orange once you get inside. This is inhibiting my progress as a mango connoisseur — they all look the same when I eat them! However, I haven’t found a mango I don’t like, so I’m happily tasting them blindly.
A is visiting again from the US so we decided to hit the mango market. It’s like a farmer’s market where the only produce being sold are mangoes. Farmers doing the selling, and since their English is about as good as my Kannada (the local language), A & I blindly brought interesting shaped and coloured fruit with no idea what it was named.
We refrained from buying the Alphonso — given our familiarity– for more unusual ones we’d never tried before. This is what we ended up with (for less than $2):
I think we have: a baiganapalli, badami, some pairi, a (maybe?) the little round ones are malgova? If anyone has better guesses, please fee free to comment!
Dez in India 