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While Thais often eat sweet snacks during the day, including cakes and puddings, called khanom, and there are a few popular after-dinner sweets such as mango and sticky rice, they don’t seem to wholly embrace the concept of dessert and typically stick to fruit to end the meal.  Of course, if luscious tropical fruit is growing in your back yard and you’ve just had a palate-exhausting dinner of various explosive flavors and textures, fruit seems like the logical last course.  Some of the fruits I’ve seen around Thailand are familiar from New York’s Chinatown, but others are so fantastically wild-looking that it was overwhelming to take them all in at first.  Here’s a beginner’s course.  I’ll add more soon.

Custard Apples – Despite the dinosaur exterior, these fruits are sweet, creamy and rich.  Each white segment contains a black seed.  It’s mostly eaten out of hand or with a spoon to scoop out the flesh.

Chompoo – Also known as rose apple, this fruit has a waxy exterior, which makes it seem unreal, and crunchy, sweet and sour interior.

Durian – The durian has a rich, pungent smell that I’ve never found matching up to the infamous descriptions of rotting flesh and sewage systems.  Its pungency is often determined by its species and ripeness.  The flesh is sweet and creamy.

Mangosteens – The famed mangosteen takes a little work.  First you have to puncture its purple outer shell and through the spongy red pith to get to the white segments at its center.  Practiced eaters can put a thumb in and split the outer layers cleanly to reveal the edible fruit.  They’re lightly sweet, citrusy and floral and worth the effort.

Dragonfruit – I wasn’t crazy about the crisp, bland flesh of dragonfruit the first time I had it, but when I had it again mixed in a fruit salad, I appreciated the textural contrast and the relief of subtle flavor it provided up against more powerful fruits.  They’d also make great porch decorations.

Guava – The Thai name for guava is farang, which is also the sometimes derogatory term used for foreigners.  It’s mealy, crisp, somewhat harder than an apple’s, and has a mild tart and tannic flavor. I really love fresh guava juice.  

Rambutan – These crazy little balls of fire are quite similar to lychees – translucent fruit clinging to a center seed.  I find them annoying to eat because often the top layer of the inner seed will stick to the flesh so that I get a fibrous sheath with every other bite of fruit.  For awhile I thought Thais might have some eating or peeling trick that would leave the fruit clean, but that’s not the case.  Apparently, the seeds in older rambutans are more likely to peel off with the fruit, which means I’m pretty bad at picking them out.

Lychees – Sweet and floral with silky flesh, the fruit is often eaten out of hand, but also found in drinks.