About a week ago, while shopping in our local oriental grocery, the owner dropped a couple of free fruits into our shopping bag for us to try.
One was a persimmon- which I had tried once before. It was ok, but nothing exciting.
The other looked like a kelly green grapefruit. The owner called it something that sort of sounded to me like cocktail, but my husband tried to duplicate his pronunciation (Kah Tau) and the man heartily agreed.
So I've been looking online all over for this fruit, and I've determined that it's a pomelo hybrid (and my original assumption, it turned out to be correct).
The Cocktail pomelo (or sometimes called Cocktail grapefruit) is a deep-bright green to yellow fruit that varies in size from large orange to grapefruit. It's a hybrid of pomelo and mandarin orange, and it's AWESOME.
It tastes even more like lemonade than Ugli fruit (an expensive grapefruit/tangerine hybrid that I love), and is much cheaper ($1 per pound).
My only problem, is that I'm on a statin drug and shouldn't eat grapefruit, and pomelo can cause the same reaction, though it's not as likely. I ate the original pomelo after skipping my statin drug the night before.
I'm seriously thinking of asking my doctor to switch my statin to one that is less likely to interact with grapefruit, just so that I can eat this fruit regularly.
Even better, it's a very low calorie fruit for it's size, because the sweetness isn't from a higher sugar content, but from a lower acid content. So it's as low in calorie, or lower than grapefruit.
I want to eat one of these every day! Yes, they're that good.
I'm definitely going to try the other varieties of Pomelo when I see them. They don't show up locally very often except in the oriental groceries - so you could have trouble finding them, except in ethnic markets (they appear to be popular in many countries and in many cultures).
For how good they are, I'm surprised they aren't more popular. They have absolutely none of the bitterness of grapefruit.
