How To Eat A Mango Without Making A Mess

How To Eat A Juicy Mango

Pic Courtesy: Rasalu Vijayawada

Mango Mania

Summer is here and so is my first mango of the season!  Let me share How To Eat A Juicy Mango with your bare hands. Mango is the king or I would say emperor of fruits and it brings a wave of nostalgia. My mom used to offer the first mango to God and only then bite into one. That’s how these luscious mangoes are revered. The mango I grew up with is known as Chinna Rasalu; Chinna means small in Telugu Small. Chinna rasalu Mangoes are my all-time favourite. They are small in size but great in taste.  I feel I am blessed to have been born here in this land of this blessed fruit. ( I know the Alphonso lovers must be snickering)  This is the most popular juicy mango from the Andhra Pradesh region of India. It is extremely sweet and divine to taste.

 

How To Eat A Juicy Mango

The mango season is here. Let me share how to eat one. You may have been doing it wrong all this time. A good mango can lift you. A juicy mango can give you as much pleasure like ice cream. The fruit is so divine that as long as you eat it, you can forget the world and its troubles. Take a break, keep the child in you alive and relish the golden fruit in your hand, in spite of the treacly juice trickling down your hand.

Pic Courtesy: Robustness.net

Mangoes take me back to my childhood. Mom used to dip the mangoes in a bucket with ice in it; no fridge, remember? We were seven of us in the family and it was normal to forego dinner and have a quarter dozen mangoes instead. If my dad had participated in a mango eating competition, he would have stood on the podium. I would love to watch him eating a mango as he was super-fast and super funny. I used to eat it slowly, savouring every juicy mouthful and taking time to finish one but my dad would finish one mango before you said “Jack Robinson”!

Mango Moustaches

Most people extract the juice and eat it with a spoon but that’s no fun, is it? Squeeze it, nip off the stalk and suck the juice straight from the mango -food for the Gods, Ambrosia. The taste is heady and feels like foodie heaven.

Squeeze it, nip the stalk, suck it—simple, isn’t it?  But be gentle with the squeezing or else the juice will just squirt out. The mango becomes like a balloon of juice. Nip the node off and sink your mouth in and suck the juice. It feels like you are in Mango heaven. These juicy wonders are fibrous. As kids, we would call them moustaches and make them stick on our faces. Mind you eating a juicy mango neatly and without wasting any juice is a cultivated art. A first-timer would be very clumsy but I am a pro at it!

The stone or the Gitakk as we call it in Punjabi is discarded by most people. But it is the prize, my dear friends.  It’s the juiciest part of the mango and is sucked till it is dry.

Mango Nostalgia

Now we count our calories and eat one mango and stop but as kids, we never counted the number. In those days there used to be no fridge to cool the mangoes and mom used to put dozens of mangoes in a bucket of water to which a block of ice was added. The ice used to be bought from the ice factory.

We were made to dress in old chemises as we would mess up our clothes. None of us protested as mangoes were too delicious to resist and the season lasted only two months in a year.

Marvellous Mangoes

Due to the hot weather and the mangoes adding to the heat we used to break out in skin eruptions. My mom’s homemade cure was fresh neem leaves from the tree, made into a paste and rolled into pea-sized balls that were popped into our mouths every morning. We had no choice as it was the bitter neem pill versus the sweet, juicy mangoes. Man, were they bitter but then the lure of the mangoes was too strong.

 I am looking forward to the summer and mangoes to make juice, mango tarts, mango yoghurt pudding, aam panna, mango kulfi, mango chutney, mango ice cream, mango mojito,  mango puri, mango pulihora. I plan to try out mango noodles. Watch this space, folks!

How To Eat A Juicy Mango

• You will not need any knife or chopping board or spoon, you just need a small plate and your hands.
• Wash the mango gently and squeeze it around so that the pulp gets softened and is juicier.
• Remove the end of the stalk and press the mango from below and start sucking in the juice that comes up.
• Keep doing this until the stone loosens and the fibre comes up.
• it is like a bloated balloon, juicy, fibrous and delectable.
• Remove the seed and suck at the fibres till the juice is dry.
• Once the seed is without any juice, leave it on the plate and pick up the mango peel which still has some pulp in it.
• Squeeze the peel gently and suck up all the juice.
• Your mango eating is over and I am sure you will be asking for more.

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