🥭 How to Eat A Mango

Everything You Need to Know About Mangoes: Science + Recipes

Get ready to be mangofied! Today we’re talking mangoes; I think they’re a magical fruit (that’s my unscientific opinion) and the King of All Fruits. They make the start of summer more exciting.

We had a couple of Mangifera indica or the mango trees on our street in Bombay, and my grandparent’s home in Goa had several Alphonso trees. In summer, my greatest joy was knocking partially ripened mangoes off their branches, slicing the fruit, sprinkling a little salt and red chilli powder, and then savoring each slice quietly and slowly. While I no longer climb mango trees or knock the fruit down, I can’t pass up an opportunity to eat an Indian mango (India has several varieties to choose from, but Alphonso and Kesar mangoes are the most popular ones exported).

For a while, the supply of Indian mangoes to America was banned, but thankfully lifted a few years ago. In Los Angeles, I now get my mangoes from Bhanu’s Indian Cuisine and Market; they sell both Alphonso and Kesar mangoes weekly, and it’s helped me cross all my mango goals for this year. I use mangoes in their various avatars in my cooking; you’ll see this fruit in several of my recipes as well as my cookbooks, including, Veg-Table. We’ll talk about amchur in a little bit, but it is an essential item in my pantry, and I think you should keep some on hand too.

The best way to eat a mango is over the kitchen sink. If I need to feel fancier, I scoop the tender flesh from the cheeks with a teaspoon.

Mango Science

The molecular makeup of a mango is fascinating. The acidity in a mango comes predominantly from citric and malic acids. As the fruit ripens, the acids are converted into sweet-tasting sugars, and the overall acidity of the fruit mellows.

Ripe mangoes are notorious for staining clothes, and I either wear dark or old clothes lest I make a mess while eating them (eating them over the sink is very helpful). The yellow color of the ripe fruit is attributed to carotenoid pigments (also seen in carrots and yellow beets). Mango stains are hard to get off clothes because the carotenoid pigments do not dissolve in water easily; they prefer fats or solvents like acetone and or alcohols like ethanol. Mangoes also contain tannins that help fix mango stains on fabrics, making them harder to remove. If you get mango stains on your clothes, dab it off quickly with paper towels, wet the spot with a few drops of cold rubbing alcohol or acetone, and keep dabbing with paper towels to wick as much color as you can off. Never rub stains; they’ll go deeper into the fabric and stick. Wash the fabric with cold water.

Mangoes also contain terpenes like myrcene that contribute to their tropical aroma. Here’s a fun fact. Myrcene is also found in cannabis and is supposed to help with the transport of cannabinoids into the brain and improve their effectiveness. But mangoes contain 23 times less myrcene than cannabis, so if you consume mangoes and cannabis simultaneously, the myrcene from mangoes won’t have a big impact on getting high. The myrcene in the cannabis is doing most of that.