Passionfruit are delicious! - especially in ice-cream.

The fruits should be wrinkled and dark when they are fully ripe - they look most unpromising. When you cut them open, they are full of seeds in a sort of gooey yellow slime.

Don't be put off by the looks - they taste great.

eiiiiiiiiii grazie all of you, surtout preventing me by being disgusted, you know I eat preferably with eyes

I will be brave in the sense of brave and ........ I'll tell you how it tastes

Passionfruit taste great. It's a very popular fruit here in Australia, and you can even buy it canned for when it's out of season, but it seems to always be in the fruit & veg section.   

It's a strong tart tropical flavour with varying degrees of sweetness, and the flavour can go a long way in a dish.

The vine grows really well in temperate climates, but it is only very mildly frost tolerant.  And in places like Canberra where Summers can get to a heat wave 42 degrees Celsius on a few Summer days, and in Winter it gets down to -7 or so below freezing, a passionfruit vine really appreciates being mulched to keep it's roots moist, and it doesn't like drying out much, so you have to keep the water up to it.   And it needs to be planted into a hot spot microclimate in the garden. Somewhere like against a north facing wall (southern hemisphere) to catch as much sun as possible. I've got a nice spot in mind outside the laundry door where I'm thinking of putting a passionfruit vine in a large planter made out of 1/2 a wine barrel. The vine will (hopefully) grow up the metal hand rails on the back steps and shade the bricks in the heat of the Summer and so help to cool down the house naturally. 

I guess if you were to try eating this fruit for the very first time, then maybe one of the easiest ways would be in a simple fruit salad.  Just get about 5 of your favourite fruits and cut them up into similar sized small chunks, and then add a passionfruit pulp (seeds and all), to the fruit salad, and maybe a tiny bit of sugar if you like. Mix the fruit in the bowl and leave for about half an hour for the flavours to mingle. Serve by itself, or with cream or icecream.

Oh and you can make a great icecream by simply adding the pulp of 1 or 2 passionfruit to a litre of good quality commercial ice cream.  Just leave the icecream container out on the kitchen bench for a little while till the icecream softens, (but don't let it go all runny), then just gently mix it in, return to the freezer, and away you go. Or you can also make it by adding some passionfruit to a good home made icecream recipe too. GeoffP is right, this is the best.  It sure takes a lot to beat relaxing in the shade of a tree, eating passionfruit icecream on a hot Summers day.

Passionfruit is also used as a flavour base of a soft drink, but if you don't want all that carbohydrate in your diet,  a nice refreshing way for a summer drink is to just add a bit of the sieved juice to some carbonated mineral water.  Also good mixed in with fruit juice too.

Hi there Ms Pablo,

Yes there are a lot of varieties of passionfruit around, only a few are grown commercially, and you are right in that only some are OK and can tolerate the colder climates.

And I agree with you, the flowers are absolutely stunning.  Certainly worth growing them I would think just for the blooms alone.

I think the fruit is a bit different with the different varieties but I have no experience with that. Only recently we have been getting giant passionfruit which are being called 'Panama passionfruit'? if I recall in our large supermarkets here.  They seem to taste very much like the traditional smaller ones, but are 2 to 3 times the size and with lots of juice. 

You may be speaking of a passionfruit called a 'Banana passionfruit' named after the colour and shape of the fruit I think, but I hav't seen the flowers of that one. And I am thinking that some could even be purely ornamental and grown for the stunning flowers.  It would be great to hear from someone who knows about these things too.

I didn't know that passionfruit were well know in the US.  I was at Uni in the Riverina (South West New South Wales, Australia) with someone from Washington State US, and he told me that the first time he had encountered a passionfruit was when he first arrived in Australia and he had to pick out all the little black seeds in a fruit salad, thinking they were apple seeds, only to find out later that they were passionfruit seeds and that they had been put in there intentionally.   

Kind regards
Thelma