Bogotá, October 16, 2012

Bogotá has the most amazing green grocery; it’s called Surtifruver de la Sabana, and it is on Calle 85 in La Zona Rosa. This store has an amazing variety of familiar and unfamiliar fruits and vegetables. One floor is devoted to vegetables and the other to fruit. For example, the vegetable level had four kinds of starchy banana/plantain and the fruit level had four kinds of sweet bananas.

Each time we’ve been to this shop, we’ve seen restaurant chefs shopping.

One nifty thing was the avocado display. The hardest avocados start on the left and as they ripen, they move right. If you want to buy an avocado to eat today, take it from the right (“listo” means “ready”).

The avocado display: the hardest on the left and the ripest on the right.

In the fruit section, I found a fruit that looked like a smaller version of the mystery fruit from Harripaul. (See Name this fruit.) I bought one and investigated.

Here is the “zapote national” in Surtifruver de la Sabana.

Inside, the fruit looked identical to the mystery fruit. It had four seeds and a sweet but fibrous pulp.

Here is the inside of the zapote national.

Ergo, I conclude that the mystery fruit is a larger version of the Zapote National. The prize for the closest guess on the mystery fruit goes to Mr. Andrew Bearman of Oakland, California. Congratulations, Andrew; your prize is on its way.

Note: This Zapote National is completely different from the other kinds of sapote (zapote) we’ve seen and tried. Regular sapotes are more like avocados: with a single large seed and a dense, rich, smooth flesh.

Here is the regular zapote. Quite different inside — one large seed and no fibre.

I took pictures of fruit in Surtifuver; so that I could learn the names and look them up.

This is soursop. We enjoyed soursop in Grenada and Trinidad. The hotel in Bogotá served guanabana juice at breakfast.

Yacón. Also called the Peruvian ground apple.

The papyuela or mountain papaya.

More info about Colombian fruits: A blog I found while searching: Colombian Fruit Juices – A Love Story.