In the hills of Puerto Rico, superfans of exotic fruit feast on durian

LAS VEGAS/PUERTO RICO – “I don’t like to use the word ‘smell’,” said Mr Juan Miranda Colon, a self-described fanatic of the world’s most odoriferous fruit. “I prefer to say it has an aroma.”

Mr Miranda, a farmer in Puerto Rico, was minutes away from feasting on durian. As its stink wafted through the humid, sticky air of the rainforest around him, he said his tongue tasted sweet with anticipation.

“I consider it the No. 1 fruit on the planet,” he said resolutely as he watched others messily shove gobs of custardy durian flesh into their mouths. “I start eating, eating, eating. I can’t control myself. I wish I had a second stomach.”

It was early August, and Mr Miranda was taking part in an annual ritual at Panoramic Fruit, a farm 30 dizzying minutes up a potholed, zigzagging road from the western Puerto Rican city of Mayaguez. A multinational collection of durian fanatics had gathered for the harvest.

An electrician had trekked from Tennessee to get his fix. A doctor had flown in from central California. There was a couple from Florida and a family from Texas.

Desperate would-be buyers from the other side of the island had also come, unannounced and imploring the farm manager for durian.

“I call them the rare-fruit nuts,” said Mr Ian Crown, owner of the 38ha farm, who lives most of the year in Massachusetts but treasures his trip to Puerto Rico for the summer harvest of tropical fruits obscure to most Americans: rambutan, mangosteen, pulasan, cupuacu and many others.

But it is durian, unlike perhaps any other fruit, that grips its enthusiasts with obsession.

Much is made of its odour, which the late American food adventurer Anthony Bourdain compared to that of a dead body left out in the sun.

But the fruit’s appearance is also particular and somewhat otherworldly. Covered in very sharp and dangerous spines, it looks like a giant puffer fish tethered to a tall tree.

Calling it rare is, of course, relative. Durians are plentiful in their native South-east Asia, and in recent years, the fruit has exploded in popularity in China, which in 2024 imported US$7 billion (S$9 billion) worth.

But in North America, fresh durian is hard to come by, not least because the odour makes it difficult to transport. H Mart, a chain specialising in Asian foods, recently posted a sign on a bin of durian at one of its stores in New York. “Do not worry. It is not a gas leak,” the sign said.

Ms Lindsay Gasik, a durian obsessive who runs a business sending frozen varieties to the United States, believes it is only a matter of time before a mania for durian sweeps across America like it did for avocados a few decades ago.

She started in 2019 by importing a few boxes of durian and, in 2024, dispatched two shipping containers filled with thousands of kilograms of the fruit. “I call the US the sleeping giant – it’s coming,” she said by telephone from Malaysia, where she spends much of the year.

Durian lovers in North America are accustomed to the indignities that come along with their passion: the exorbitant cost – as little as a few dollars for about 450g in South-east Asia, but multiples more in the US – and the sneering of durian haters.

Yet, at Panoramic Fruit every summer, durian fans enjoy the rare opportunity in the US outside Hawaii to devour the fruit in a judgment-free zone.

Ms Yen Vu and Mr Gleb Chuvpilo, a couple who drove to the farm from their home in San Juan, bought eight medium-sized durians at US$5 for 450g. It was enough to feed a large, hungry family for a week, but the couple said they would probably polish them off in a weekend.

Their love for the fruit has taken them on much longer journeys: Twice, they have travelled to Borneo just to gorge on it.

Ms Vu said durian was an early litmus test in their relationship. After meeting at a salsa lesson in New York, she queried Mr Chuvpilo, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist born in Ukraine, on whether he had tried the fruit. He liked it. But what if he had hated it?

“It would have put a strain on the relationship,” said Ms Vu, who is from Vietnam and has enjoyed durian since she was a child.

Many of those who gathered for the durian feast in Puerto Rico have family roots in East Asia. Durian, for them, evokes childhood memories.

Family doctor Teresa Chang, who lives in Santa Ynez, California, remembers excitement growing up in western New York when someone came home with a haul of durian.

“Oh, my god! Get the cleaver!” someone would yell before attacking the olive-green husks that surround the flesh. “They would eat it and then dance through the living room,” she said.

Durian also reminds her of trips to Taiwan during summer, when the family would feast on tropical fruits that were hard to come by in Buffalo, New York. “There’s a nostalgia of being in a hot and humid place,” she said, “the juices dripping down your face and all over your fingers, the sticky lips.”

For the uninitiated, the taste of durian is difficult to describe, partly because even when they are from the same tree, durians can have such a variety of flavours.

Dr Chang bit into the ocher-yellow flesh of one durian and paused to consider what she was tasting. A hint of graham crackers, she concluded. Someone else mentioned burnt sugar.

Durian can be bitter or bubble-gum sweet. With the texture, and sometimes the taste, of creme brulee, it resembles dairy products that happen to grow on trees, said Mr Crown, the farm owner.

He cut a small sample of one durian with the tip of his knife and dabbed the flesh into his mouth. “It’s like a kick in the head with a creamy, delicious, sweet taste on the back end,” he said.

Mr Crown, a former commodities trader with a degree in agriculture and a curiosity about South-east Asian fruits, bought the farm in 1994 after spending years scouting for a place that had the right climate and soil. It had over the decades been a cattle ranch, a coffee and citrus farm, and a sugar cane plantation.

The first trees he planted were rambutan, a hairy, walnut-size fruit similar to lychees. Then he put in mangosteen trees, which produce sweet, bright white fruit encased in purple orbs.

But his rare-fruit friends insisted that he was missing a key crop.

“Everybody said, ‘You have to have durian,’” Mr Crown recalled. So, before even tasting it, he planted the trees. Fortunately, he does not mind the strong smell. “I have some cheese experiments in my fridge that would frighten the board of health,” he said.

The manager of the farm, Mr Roberto Luciano, had never seen a durian either. And when the trees finally bore fruit, he was revolted. “I have a very weak stomach,” he said.

Part of Mr Luciano’s job is to fend off would-be durian customers who come to the farm uninvited, desperate for an allotment. The farm’s 40-odd durian trees can produce hundreds of kilos of fruit, but they are highly prized and access to the farm is supposed to be by appointment only.

On a recent morning, Mr Yingqiao Zheng, a chef at a Chinese restaurant in San Juan, the capital, drove through the farm gates eager to fill the trunk of his Toyota Highlander.

Mr Luciano informed him that he could have only about 18kg worth of durian, enough to fill a milk crate.

Many of the durian fans who flew to the island from the mainland came with Mr Gerry Grunsfeld, a lawyer who lives in New York and who runs a Facebook group called “fruit 4 sale”, which hosts buyers and sellers of fruit in the US.

At the farm, Mr Grunsfeld tasted rambutan, mangosteen and other fruits. But he drew the line at durian, recalling a previous attempt when he had tried a tiny morsel and said it tasted like “spoilt onions”.

“I was burping onion for an hour or two,” he said.

“It’s a fruit I really want to like,” he added. “People get such incredible pleasure from it. And if there is pleasure to be had, I want to have it.”

By the end of a morning of fruit tasting, as he watched his friends devour gobs of durian, he was goaded into trying it again. He sniffed at a sliver of oozing durian flesh pinched in his fingers and, after much hesitation, took a nibble.

Then he spat it out. “Onions,” he said, a flavour that none of the other durian tasters had evoked. “I like onions – but not in a fruit.” NYTIMES