Foraging for green mangos, making jam

It's mango season again.  All over Caracas, trees are weighed down by green mangoes. It looks like this.

It always amazes me how prolific these trees even though nobody pays them the slightest bit of attention. Truth is nobody pays much attention to the fruit either. In the next couple months there will be green mangoes littering the streets of the city, by the middle of July the pungent smell of rotting mangoes starts to the fill the air. They clog up sewer drains, get eaten by golden  retreivers, or, in the best case scenario, they're hauled away by trash collection services and dumped  in landfills. It has more than once occurred to me why this is an incredible appropriate parable for Venezuelan society, but I won't bore you with that here. 

Mind you these aren't the fancy mangoes you're likely to buy at an upmarket grocer like Traders Joes (is that upmarket?) or Fresh Fields (that certainly is). Those have a more brilliant flavor, and look like this:

The ones that fall off the trees in abundance here a smaller and tend to have a lot more fibers in them that get stuck in your teeth. They look like the ones below (these are still green)

Right now Caracas has more of mango #2 than you can shake a stick at, but people end up paying quite a bit to buy mango # 1 in the supermarket. This world works in strange ways.


This mango season I decided to make something with mangoes. The easiest thing to make is called "jalea de mango," which is something like a jelly though it doesn't really have pectin or anything gelatinous in it. It's actually just mango pulp and sugar. It's the sort of traditional thing that you don't come across very often despite the absurd abundance of mangoes that would make it logical.


So I walked down the block my home-made mango grabber -- a collapsed coat hanger taped to a broomstick -- and pulled down about 30 of them. People on the street of course looked at me like I was an idiot, since only homeless people or glue-sniffing street kids ever pull down mangoes (and even that's rare). But I'm used to it. You stick a bunch of them in a pot and set them to boil.

After a while they start to look like this 

You take them out and let them cool, then scrape the pulp out of them with a knife. Then you have to remove whatever stray mango fibers might have ended up in the pulp because it's a drag to be pulling something like feels like hair out of your mouth. You add the sugar and cook it over a low flame until it thickens up. While you cook it has a surprisingly smell of pumpkin. Weird. The final product looks like this.

It has a taste that's a bit like tangy applesauce. You just basically eat it with a spoon, though you could spread it over cake or something like that if you were so inspired.


I put it in jars and give it to people. It's crazy how there's an approximately inexhaustible supply of the raw materials to make this. I somehow wish the local bakeries (Caracas has one almost on every street corner) would pluck the mangoes that literally fall in front of their doorstep and use it during mango season to fill pastries or something like that. The Venezuelan way is generally to leave the rotting mangoes for the municipal trash collectors to drag off to the landfills and instead use some sugary apple filling likely imported from Chile. But a guy can dream, right? To be fair, this same sort of thing happens in the US. My old college roommate Walt lives in Boulder, CO, and gets a good chunk of his diet from foraged fruit from around town.


I've another couple weeks before the mangoes are all over the sidewalk. My next project is going to be mango chutney. This will probably require me letting the mangoes ripen, inviting large quantities of fruit flies into my kitchen, but I'm looking forward to it.