Christopher Howell comments:-

'The picture above is a mix of high altitude and lowland Passiflora species that I collected in western Venezuela in the early '90s. Miguel Molinari & Tim Skimina from the Passiflora Society International accompanied me on the trip. The photo was originally loaned to John MacDougal at the Missouri Botanical Garden to use in the garden's 2000 Passifloraceae poster.'

Commercial passion fruit juice production

The world market production is estimated by Passion fruit juice, a great site with plenty of information about edible passion fruit, at 640 000 metric tonnes per annum, the bulk of which is P. edulis flavicarpa. Commercially available passion fruit juice is almost always P. edulis based. The purple and yellow (flavicarpa) varieties and crosses between the two are grown commercially everywhere from South America to Africa, Asia, Australia and U.S.A. The juices and indeed the fresh pulp from the fruit with or without the seeds are used worldwide in exotic tropical drinks, cocktails, cordials, liqueurs (e.g. blended with Cointreau and Cognac), chocolates, sauces, ice creams, sorbets and more. Type 'passion fruit recipe' or 'Passion fruit drink' into Google to see what is out there. Even better buy Patrick Worley's great Passionfruit cookbook.

  Passion fruit taste characterists

Passion fruit and their juice bring their unique taste and smell, a combination of acidity and sweetness with an intense distinctive perfumed aromatic smell that almost defines the tropics. Many would say that as a group they are the best tasting fruit and juice in the world. It is a rare tropical juice mix without passion fruit juice in it, often as just a small percentage as its intensity is so great.  In UK Rubicon Exotic Juice Drinks make an excellent range of exotic drinks including still and fizzy purple passion fruit juice in bottles, cartons and cans. The cartons are very widely available and are very good indeed. Unbeatable outdoors in summer.

  The tastiest passion fruit?

The fruit are widely available worldwide, usually being  P. edulis, purple fruit, P. edulis flavicarpa, yellow fruit or occasionally P. ligularis, orange fruit with a hard brittle shell. These all keep relatively well compared with other species. Opinions vary widely as to which are the tastiest fruit, partly this is of course subjective. If fruit are picked too early however, and are not given time to ripen fully in the sun, they can be lacking in juice and taste even if grown in ideal conditions. Many do not travel well so if they are not grown locally you will never know how good they are. Also if a plant is being grown outside its normal habitat with regard to either sunshine, day length, rainfall, temperature or soil, it may not taste as good as it should. The fruit of some edible species are shown above.

  P. Tripartita var. mollissima

The fruit are often described as insipid but that is probably due to species confusion with P. tarminiana fruit (above) which are not very great. Martin Murray reports that grown in Costa Rica it has a lovely sherbert taste. The plants are being grown there outside their usual conditions under shade cloth, probably not native to Costa Rica, and so are prone to disease and are scrapped each year and fresh plants grown from seed.

  P. antioquiensis John Vanderplank speaks very highly of this.

edible passion fruit images >>