“What is that?” I ask my mother, who’s urging me to taste durian – an unusual looking fruit with an unfriendly spiky exterior. The smell of the thing is nauseating, and reminds me of a travel show I once saw, in which a Filipino street vendor reassuringly says to the nervous host about to take his first bite: “Smells like hell, tastes like heaven”.

Holding my nose, I bite into the lemon-coloured flesh and wait for my tastebuds to familiarise themselves with the new fruit. It’s very soft so chewing isn’t necessary; stringy in parts, and there’s a creaminess and mild mango (or is it banana?) flavour to it. It’s weird yet fabulous.

Similar exotic fruits have been growing in Australia’s tropics for the last 30 years. The region’s fertile soil, abundant rainfall and signature sunshine have turned tropical Queensland – from the Atherton Tablelands near Cairns, all the way down to the Sunshine Coast – into somewhat of a fruit bowl, producing an assortment of distinctly South East Asian produce.

Naturally, with such interesting things being grown in backyards and commercial orchards across the region, a unique food culture has begun to take shape. “Two things I noticed is that the cooking traditions of coastal Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders, as well as those of the Pacific region, are far more explicit here,” says Clare Richards, author of Tropical Cuisine: Cooking in Clare’s Kitchen. “Another thing is the produce that grows in this part of the world.”

In 2006, after relocating from Broome to Cairns, Clare quickly encountered ingredients she’d never seen before. “Some of the Asian greens that I hadn’t really come across were amaranth and wild pepper leaf,” she says. “As for fruits, one of the first things that really caught my attention was jackfruit.

“Jackfruit is a classic example of tropical fruits that are both a vegetable at one point in their life and a fruit in another. And different parts of the fruit can be used in different ways. So, with jackfruit, when it’s young and green, it’s used as a vegetable, say, in curries. Once it reaches full maturity and ripens, it’s used as a fruit.”

After discovering resources on such foods were slim, Clare set out to self-publish her first book, Tropical Cuisine – part reference, part cookbook, and an attempt to help others build confidence in using exotic ingredients. “For general food lovers, the book reveals an array of flavours and textures that are quite different from what you encounter in temperate foods.”

Tropical fusion

It’s this fabulous fusion of tropical ingredients and Asian and Indigenous cooking methods that nabbed Clare’s cookbook a nomination for innovation at the 2010 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Paris. The local response has been just as warm, and Clare has her sights on expanding her book into a four-part series.

Interestingly, Australia’s poster child for tropical cuisine wasn’t always so savvy. “Even though I’m really adventurous, I still took time to try all the different things at the market.” These days, Clare says dinner comprises something like longans and shitake mushrooms with soba noodles – a dish she would have furrowed her brow at in years past. Since moving to the tropics, lighter, Asian-inspired dishes have become the norm. “I’ve naturally moved towards a lot more salads, stir-fries, barbecues, grills, and the climate suits spicy foods as well. So it’s a natural place to do a lot more curries.”

Despite their increased availability, due to strengthened transport corridors, such foods are yet to be embraced by everyone, admits Clare. When asked if her friends have adopted a tropical diet, she says: “I’m out there, definitely. But I’m certainly not on my own. There’s a very dedicated core of people who really want to eat the stuff we grow in this part of the world.”

Exotic fruit bowl

Clare’s descriptions of tropical fruits make the pineapple seem, well, ordinary. For example, star fruit has a “vanilla-like, rice pudding flavour,” according to Clare (who makes a mean fruit salad using star fruit, purple-veined sweet potato, lime juice and the papaya she’s grown out back). Then there’s sapodilla – also known as brown sugar fruit – which is “very sweet when ripe; almost like caramel”, and which lends itself nicely to cakes and puddings. “Because of that flavour, kind of like you get in sticky date pudding, it’s great to use where you’d usually use dates,” says Clare.

Alison and Digby Gotts run Cape Tribulation Exotic Fruit Farm, and grow more than 100 varieties of tropical fruit. Running daily tasting tours and selling to local farmers' markets, the pair has carved out a happy life in their rainforest paradise, thanks to the public’s interest in the bounteous fruit bowl they grow.

Earlier this year, the Gotts set up a tropical fruit stall at their farm gate with an honesty box. “This has been a lot of fun,” they write on their blog, “particularly collecting the money – usually all in 20 cent pieces. The bank is going to love us.”

High winds resulting from Cyclone Yasi cost the farm about 20 of its fruit trees, but thanks to the cyclone changing course and veering south, Alison and Digby were among the lucky ones. “There has been some good news … my vegetable garden came through; the eggplant survived; the durian flowers are still on the trees.”

Like Clare, one of their most beloved offerings is the jackfruit (which grows to be the world’s biggest tree fruit and can weigh up to 40kg). Splitting one open for a crowd of visitors never fails to draw a collective “Oooh”. According to Alison and Digby, the golden flesh tastes just like banana bubblegum.

This craving for diverse flavours, like those of rambutan, mangosteen and lychee, has kept the tourist-aimed Taste of the Tropics food trails (offering five tours in total) running for more than a decade. Promoted on its website as “Cairns’ tastiest sightseeing tour”, it’s a way for the culinary curious to mingle with farmers, sip on tropical fruit wines and learn the basics of food production.

The Queensland government released a booklet which explains the uses for the tropical ingredients now grown on home turf. The guide is called Tropical tastes: Fruits, foods and flavours of north Queensland and you can request a free copy of it here.

Depending on the produce and seasonality, tropical foods can be found in supermarkets outside the region. Clare says: “Some foods grown here are available nationally, such as plantains, coconut, jackfruit, mangosteen, durian, pomelo, and slightly lesser known ones like black sapote and sapodilla.”

Clare’s advice for those too intimidated to try foreign ingredients is to get to know two at a time. “Play with a new herb and vegie that are traditionally cooked together. If you’ve got an ethnic storeholder who has a history of cooking with those ingredients, ask them a million and one questions. They’re a very valuable resource,” she says. “They will give you a sense of what the flavours are and how long they need to be cooked. After that, it becomes easier to experiment and start doing your own thing.”

Recipes

• Sweet potato, papaya, lime and passionfruit salad

• Barramundi in wild pepper and lordyline leaves