Cherimoyas and Guavas Like to Grow on the Central Coast

I’ll admit it. Ever since I first noticed chirimoyas at the farmers market, they’ve intimidated me.

Something about their leathery, green skin and warty spines gave off a "you don’t know the first thing about me" sort of a force field. But after weeks of buying avocados from the adjacent bin, my curiosity overcame my fear: I bought a $6 cherimoya and haven’t been the same since. 

Cherimoyas, like avocados, are ripe when they give just a little bit to a gentle poke. 

“They’re really delicious fruit, but the strength of the flavor can be overpowered easily,” said Will Brokaw of Brokaw Nursery—the only farmstand at the Aptos and downtown markets that sell cherimoyas. So Brokaw recommends cutting the fruit in half, scooping out the flesh with a spoon and spitting out the black seeds.

Half-hoping the inside would be as exotic as its armour-like skin implies, I was amazed to discover a slimy white flesh with big black seeds throughout.  A taste completely foreign, like a lemony-banana, surprised and delighted me to a point where I never wanted it to end. Although not mushy, the ripe cherimoya has a creaminess to it, and I finally understood why the English term for the fruit is “custard apple.”

Native to the Andean Valleys of Columbia, Peru and Ecuador, the cherimoya, or "chirimoya," comes from a hearty evergreen-like tree that thrives in subtropical climates. Although the first cherimoya seeds made it to California in 1871, they didn’t flourish like other crops—only in a few lucky pockets of Southern California and the Central Coast. 

“My dad was a real pioneer, an experimenting type of guy," Brokaw said. "He was pretty close to the whole start of the kiwi-ization of California in the late '70s.”

Brokaw Nurser started growing avocados and citrus fruit in Soledad in 1967. A few years later, the Brokaw family started a second nursery in Santa Paula and began experimenting with propagating cherimoyas and guavas. Both the cherimoyas and guavas took well to the foggy climate of Ventura County, and the Brokaw Nursery now grows eight acres of cherimoyas and 12 acres of guavas.

“Too many cherimoyas,” laughed Brokaw. “They don’t bear heavily like the guavas and avocados." But what the cherimoya tree lacks in fertility, it makes up in delicious eccentricity.

Similar to cherimoyas, guavas are in season from February to April. They grow on shrubs and are picked when they are ripe.

“You have to go in and do several picks of them,” said Brokaw. They are ready to be picked when they turn from green to yellow.

“Guavas will pretty much kick everything’s (butt), as far as flavor goes," Brikaw said. "I just eat them as they are—the core, the seeds, the skin. It’s like a seedless apricot or cherry. They’re really easy to eat." They also kick butt in the vitamin C department, registering at 628 percent of what we need daily of that good stuff.

Guavas are among one of the most fragrant fruits I have ever smelled, and Brokaw recalled that many people who have been to Brazil say, “this smells like Brazil!”

Many of the guavas that Brokaw sells are snatched up by bar owners at the San Francisco market to be used in mixed drinks. Brokaw Nursery also takes avocados and kiwis to the downtown and Aptos Markets, and will be have mangos and passionfruit come October.

The Aptos market is Saturdays year round at Cabrillo College, 6500 Soquel Dr., from 8 a.m.-noon. The downtown market is every Wednesday from 2:30-6 p.m. downtown.