The Mango Analysis

In Cambodia, mangos are only in season for about three months: March, April, and May. I’ve been anticipating mango season since the day I got here, both because previous Peace Corps Volunteers have spoken extensively on the sheer volume and deliciousness of mangos in-season, and also because mangos are in my top 6 favorite fruits. The following represents some of the findings I’ve recorded during this ongoing personal research project on Cambodian Mangos.

The Khmer eat mangos in all—and I mean all—their stages of ripeness. It doesn’t matter how pale green the mangos are, there is a use for it and the Khmer have found it.

Pale Green: These mangos are as unripe as they can get. Hard as a rock, and sour enough to make you scream for mama. Some Khmer love the sour flavor, so they eat these mangos cut up and dipped in some chili salt. (A quick note on chili salt: it is salt, mixed with chili peppers, and sometimes a little bit of sugar. The sugar is key. Less successful mixtures only have salt and chili peppers.) Sometimes the pale green mango will get grated and stir-fried, which makes it taste kind of like a radish. Sometimes it’ll get grated and paired with various other leaves and herbs, raw, in your morning noodles.

Pale Yellow: the majority of Khmer love the pale yellow mango. While it is still hard, it’s a little less extreme in its sourness and actually tastes quite good paired with the chili salt. In my desperation I have sampled more than my fair share of the pale yellow variety and have enjoyed the sour-sweet (pale yellow begins to show signs of subtle sweetness)-salty-spicy combo. The pale yellow mangos are also grated and soaked in fish sauce to make a dressing for grilled fish. While I still prefer to eat my grilled fish with soy sauce, some enjoy the sour flavor in their entrée dishes and the pale yellow mango plus fish pairing is a good option.

Golden Yellow: This is hands down my favorite level of mango ripeness. While still not completely ripe, some mangos (apple mangos especially) will have already developed such an intense sweet flavor. The best part about this golden yellow variety is that they also retain some of that hard texture, but not so much apple-hard (think ripe nectarine). I know I don’t really like it when precious mango juices run down my chin or my hands instead of ending up in my stomach, and with the golden yellow variety there is none of that messiness.  

Orange: These mangos are overripe, at least by Khmer standards. Most Khmer think that this is too ripe to consume, so they let the cows or pigs eat them. I think this is an incredible waste so I scavenge all of the orange-ripe mangos from everyone I know and eat them myself. These mangos have lost some of their texture and are a little too mushy by my standards, but the flavor makes up for it and I just deal with the juices that are wasted via dripping. Sometimes they are truly overripe and are kind of fermented (a tinny aftertaste), but mangos are such a delicacy that I eat them anyway.

In my backyard, there are about 8 mango trees. I’m not sure what all these different kinds of mangos are called in English, but directly translated from Khmer, we have Apple Mangos, Papaya Mangos, and Hmong Glass Mangos (yum, Hmong glass).

Apple Mangos: These are small mangos that, at their biggest, are no bigger than a large apricot. These are also the sweetest and most delicious, in my opinion. At their optimal ripeness, they still boast a vividly green peel, so you can only tell if they are ripe or not by the way they feel (and if you are looking at them on a tree, by the amount of sap that has dripped down their sides; lots of sap means lots of sweet, which also means ready to eat), which is still hard, but gives a little (kind of like an optimally ripe cantaloupe). The kind of sweetness they boast is unadulterated sweet—even in their between pale-yellow and golden yellow stages, they are fully sweet without hints of sour.

Papaya Mangos: These have about as much delicious mango meat as the apple mango, but their shape is more like that of a traditional mango (kind of teardrop-shaped)—so, small, is what I’m getting at. These, at their optimal ripeness, have a yellow peel and are soft to the touch (think ripe peach). However, even at their optimal ripeness, they still kind of have a sour bite at the end. When you first bite into them, they are sweet, and delicious, but after the bite travels to the back of your mouth you start to feel the sour and it’s not intense, but a little startling. The mango meat at the tip is usually the sourest, with the sweetest parts at the stem.

Hmong Glass Mangos: These puppies are huge, more like the ones you’d see at American supermarkets. Their pits are also surprisingly small for such a big fruit. I ate one after lunch and I was full to bursting. These can only really be eaten when they are at the orange stage because anything before that is too overwhelmingly sour (in my desperation one afternoon, I picked a green one that was kind of soft to the touch—like the optimal apple mango—but I laid down and cried after I bit into it because it was so sour). At their optimal ripeness, the peel is yellow-orange, and they are soft to the touch, much like the papaya mango. It sneaks a hint of sour even at the orange stage, and, like the papaya mango, is sourest at the tip and sweetest at the stem.

There is another tree in the backyard that bears the Chinese Glass Mango. They are not yet ripe, but according to my host pa, they go for 12000 riel (about $3) for 10 fruits as opposed to 4000 riel ($1) for the Hmong glass mangos (market, not wholesale, price. At wholesale prices my ma sold 150 kilos of them for $10—granted they were unripe, but still!). Mango season isn’t over yet, and it won’t be over until I try these of the Chinese Glass variety. Stay tuned.