If Black Sapote Tastes Like Chocolate Pudding, Why Don't We Eat It?

Black sapote is the chocolate pudding fruit: cut a ripe one open and the flesh is dark, glossy and soft enough to eat with a spoon. It grows on a tree, it's packed with vitamin C, and people in Mexico have eaten it for centuries. So why don't we eat black sapote, and why have most people never even seen one? The answer starts with tannins. An unripe black sapote is so astringent that botanist Julia Morton called it caustic and bitter, and in the Philippines it was used as a fish poison. A 2022 study by Liliana Merino-Sanchez's team followed the fruit on the tree as its tannins fell and its vitamin C climbed. But the perfect pudding stage lasts only a few days, the ripe fruit looks rotten, the tree dies in a frost, and its close relative the persimmon can even form a stomach bezoar. Put it all together and you get a dessert that grows on trees but was never going to make it into a supermarket. Chapters: 0:00 The chocolate pudding fruit in a Florida backyard 0:49 Is the pudding thing just hype? 1:55 Tannins, sandpaper tongues and fish poison 3:01 The few-day window between hard and puddle 3:44 Why a ripe black sapote looks rotten 4:37 A tropical tree that dies in a frost 5:34 The sapote that's really a persimmon References: Julia F. Morton, Fruits of Warm Climates, Black Sapote: https://growables.org/information/Tropical... Wilson Popenoe, Manual of Tropical and Subtropical Fruits, The Black Sapote: https://growables.org/information/Tropical... Merino-Sanchez et al. (2022), Physicochemical and antioxidant changes of black sapote during on-tree fruit development, Acta Botanica Mexicana: https://core.ac.uk/download/524570335.pdf University of Florida IFAS Extension, Black Sapote Growing in the Florida Home Landscape (HS305): https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/HS305 Persimmon bezoar case report (2025), Cureus: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/...