“I don’t like to use the word ‘smell’,” said Juan Miranda Colón, a self-described fanatic of the world’s most odoriferous fruit. “I prefer to say it has an aroma.”
Mr. Miranda, a farmer in Puerto Rico, was minutes away from feasting on the fruit, durian, and as its stink wafted through the humid, sticky air of the rainforest around him, he said his tongue tasted sweet with anticipation.
“I consider it the No. 1 fruit on the planet,” he said resolutely as he watched others messily shove gobs of custardy durian flesh into their mouths. “I start eating, eating, eating. I can’t control myself. I wish I had a second stomach.”
It was early August, and Mr. Miranda was taking part in an annual ritual at Panoramic Fruit, a farm 30 dizzying minutes up a potholed, zigzagging road from the western Puerto Rican city of Mayagüez. A multinational collection of durian fanatics had gathered for the harvest.
An electrician had trekked from Tennessee to get his fix. A doctor had flown in from central California. There was a couple from Florida, and a family from Texas. Desperate would-be buyers from the other side of the island had also come, unannounced and imploring the farm manager for durian.
“I call them the rare-fruit nuts,” said Ian Crown, the owner of the 94-acre farm, who lives most of the year in Massachusetts but treasures his trip to Puerto Rico for the summer harvest of tropical fruits obscure to most Americans: rambutan, mangosteen, pulasan, cupuaçu and many others.
But it’s durian, unlike perhaps any other fruit, that grips its enthusiasts with obsession.
Much is made of durian’s odor, which Anthony Bourdain, the food adventurer, compared to that of a dead body left out in the sun, but the fruit’s appearance is also particular and somewhat otherworldly. Covered in very sharp and dangerous spines, the fruit looks like a giant puffer fish tethered to a tall tree.
Calling it rare is of course relative. Durians are plentiful in their native Southeast Asia, and in recent years the fruit has exploded in popularity in China, which last year imported $7 billion worth.
But in North America, fresh durian is hard to come by, not least because the odor makes it difficult to transport. H Mart, a chain specializing in Asian foods, recently posted a sign on a bin of durian at one of its stores in Queens. “DO NOT WORRY IT IS NOT A GAS LEAK,” the sign said.
Lindsay Gasik, a durian obsessive who runs a business sending frozen varieties to the United States, believes it’s only a matter of time before a mania for durian sweeps across America like it did for avocados a few decades ago. Ms. Gasik started in 2019 by importing a few boxes of durian and last year dispatched two shipping containers filled with thousands of pounds of the fruit.
“I call the U.S. the sleeping giant — it’s coming,” she said by phone from Malaysia, where she spends much of the year.
Durian lovers in North America are accustomed to the indignities that come along with their passion: the exorbitant cost (as little as a few dollars per pound in Southeast Asia, but multiples more in the United States) and the sneering of durian haters.
Yet at Panoramic Fruit every summer, durian fans enjoy the rare opportunity in the United States (outside of Hawaii) to devour the fruit in a judgment-free zone.
Yen Vu and Gleb Chuvpilo, a couple who drove to the farm from their home in San Juan, bought eight medium-size durian at $5 per pound. It was enough to feed a large, hungry family for a week, but the couple said they would probably polish them off in a weekend. Their love for the fruit has taken them on much longer journeys: Twice they have traveled to Borneo just to gorge on it.
Ms. Vu says durian was an early litmus test in their relationship. After meeting at a salsa lesson in New York City, she queried Mr. Chuvpilo, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist born in Ukraine, on whether he had tried the fruit. He liked it. But what if he had hated it?
“It definitely would have put a strain on the relationship,” said Ms. Vu, who is originally from Vietnam and has enjoyed durian since she was a child.
Many of those who gathered for the durian feast in Puerto Rico have family roots in East Asia. Durian, for them, evokes childhood memories.
Teresa Chang, a family doctor who lives in Santa Ynez, Calif., remembers excitement growing up in western New York when someone came into the house with a haul of durian. “Oh my God! Get the cleaver!” someone would yell before attacking the thick olive-green husks that surround the flesh. “They would eat it and then dance through the living room,” Dr. Chang said.
Durian also reminds her of trips to Taiwan during the summer, when the family would feast on tropical fruits that were hard to come by in Buffalo.
“There’s a nostalgia of being in a hot and humid place,” she said, “the juices dripping down your face and all over your fingers, the sticky lips.”
For the uninitiated, the taste of durian is difficult to describe, partly because even when they’re from the same tree, durians can have such a variety of flavors.
Dr. Chang bit into the ochre-yellow flesh of one durian and paused to consider what she was tasting. A hint of graham crackers, she concluded. Someone else mentioned burned sugar. Durian can be bitter or bubble-gum sweet. With the texture, and sometimes the taste, of crème brûlée, they resemble dairy products that happen to grow on a tree, Mr. Crown, the farm owner, says.
He cut a small sample of one durian with the tip of his knife and dabbed the flesh into his mouth. “It’s like a kick in the head with a creamy, delicious, sweet taste on the back end,” he said.
Mr. Crown, a former commodities trader with a degree in agriculture and a curiosity about Southeast Asian fruits, bought the farm in 1994 after spending years scouting for a place that had the right climate and soil. It had over the decades been a cattle ranch, a coffee and citrus farm, and a sugar cane plantation.
The first trees Mr. Crown planted were rambutan, the hairy, walnut-size fruit similar to lychees. Then he put in mangosteen trees, which produce sweet, bright white fruit encased in purple orbs.
But his rare-fruit friends insisted that he was missing a key crop.
“Everybody said, ‘You have to have durian!’” Mr. Crown recalled. So before even tasting it, he planted the trees. Fortunately, he doesn’t mind strong smell. “I have some cheese experiments in my fridge that would frighten the board of health,” he said.
The manager of the farm, Roberto Luciano, had never seen a durian either. And when the trees finally bore fruit, he was revolted.
“I have a very weak stomach,” he said.
Part of Mr. Luciano’s job is to fend off would-be durian customers who come to the farm uninvited, desperate for an allotment. The farm’s 40-odd durian trees can produce hundreds of pounds of fruit — but they are highly prized and access to the farm is supposed to be by appointment only.
On a recent morning, Yingqiao Zheng, a chef at a Chinese restaurant in San Juan, the capital, drove through the farm gates eager to fill the trunk of his Toyota Highlander.
Mr. Luciano informed him that he could have only 40 pounds’ worth of durian, enough to fill a milk crate.
Many of the durian fans who flew to the island from the mainland came with Gerry Grunsfeld, a lawyer who lives in Brooklyn and who runs a Facebook group called “fruit 4 sale,” which hosts buyers and sellers of fruit in the United States.
At the farm, Mr. Grunsfeld tasted rambutan, mangosteen and other fruits. But he drew the line at durian, recalling a previous attempt when he had tried a tiny morsel and said it tasted like “spoiled onions.”
“I was burping onion for an hour or two,” he said.
“It’s a fruit I really want to like,” Mr. Grunsfeld said. “People get such incredible pleasure from it. And if there is pleasure to be had, I want to have it.”
By the end of a morning of fruit tasting, as he watched his friends devour gobs of durian, he was goaded into trying it again. He sniffed at a sliver of oozing durian flesh pinched in his fingers and after much hesitation took a nibble.
Then he spat it out.
“Onions,” he said, a flavor that none of the other durian tasters had evoked. “I like onions — but not in a fruit.”
Research was contributed by Susan C. Beachy and Irena Hwang.
Thomas Fuller, a Page One Correspondent for The Times, writes and rewrites stories for the front page.
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