Tropical fruits

Wrinkled purple skin gives away nothing. Crack one open and you get the most aromatic juice in the tropics — bright, tart, perfumed, with crunchy black seeds suspended in golden jelly. One spoon eaten straight, or drizzle the pulp over yogurt, ice cream, or a pavlova that needs the lift.

The yellow cousin of purple passion fruit — bigger, juicier, sharper. A single fruit yields enough pulp for two cocktails or a full mousse. Tartness sits closer to lime than perfume, which is why Latin American kitchens reach for maracuya when passion fruit alone would feel too floral.

Spiky green skin hides a pulpy white flesh with a flavour the Caribbean built juices around — pineapple meets strawberry meets banana cream, with a fibrous, custardy texture and a clean tartness on the finish. Hand-sized fruit will feed two; larger fruits, double that.

Pale green skin, hot-pink centre. The aroma walks into the room before the fruit does — tropical, floral, faintly musky. Eat skin and all, seeds and all; the seeds are crunchy and entirely edible. Vitamin-C density that puts oranges in the shade, and a flavour you can taste at three paces.

Entirely edible — core included. Sweeter, softer, lower-acid than the full-sized pineapple, and small enough that one fruit serves two people without leftovers. The crown is decorative, the flesh is dessert-grade, and the core is tender enough to eat without the wedge-and-discard ceremony.

Halve, deseed, lime, spoon. A baby papaya is one breakfast, one bowl, one knife — vivid orange flesh, soft tropical sweetness, a faint musky aroma that lime turns into something brilliant. Smaller than the dinner-plate full-sized fruit, and far less of a kitchen project.

Alphonso-style: smaller, less fibrous, deeper orange, more aromatic. The mango people compare every other mango to. Score, scoop, eat — or halve and spoon out cold. One ripe baby mango is one breakfast, one dessert, or one of the better small decisions you'll make this week.

The original chocolate, in its raw form. Long ridged pods open onto sweet white pulp wrapped around the beans — the pulp eats like lychee sorbet, the beans are what becomes chocolate once they're fermented and roasted. Rarely seen outside the cacao belt, almost never sold whole in the UK.

The Japanese cultivar runs larger, pulpier and markedly sweeter than the South American passion fruit most people know. Less tart, more dessert — Kagoshima growers select for a balance that reads as gift-grade rather than market-stall. Same intoxicating perfume, half the acidity.

Grown to an exact weight, ripened on the branch, and shipped in a velvet-lined wooden box. The most precisely farmed mango on earth — Taiyo-no-Tamago, "Egg of the Sun" — and the closest thing the fruit world has to a luxury watch. Single fruits have sold at Japanese auction for record sums.