Tiny Mellons

Tiny Melons - Pepquinos - Coming to America

Posted May 14th 2009 3:00PM by Sara Bonisteel
Filed under: Fruit, Food News

The pepquiños are coming, the pepquiños are coming.
Hot off the news that it's now tiny melon season in Britain, the producers of what may just be the world's only bite-sized melon -- the pepquiño -- say they're growing these grape-size fruits on New York's Long Island.
"It's already in America, but very, very small," Nicolas Mazard, the U.S. manager of Koppert Cress, told Slashfood Thursday. "So it will be ready this summer."
Learn how to eat these 3/4-inch fruits after the jump.
"They're a fruit," Anneke Cuppen, a Koppert Cress spokeswoman, told us by phone from the Netherlands. "It's a combination between the cucumber and the melon."
A naturally occurring fruit from South America, the pepquiños have been grown by the company in the aptly named town of Monster for the last four years.
The 3/4-inch melons grow on vines. Their rind is edible, and the pepquiños are available in Europe from early May to November, officials said.
Mazard says they taste "just like a very simple cucumber" with a bit more crunch. The company has been marketing the fruit for use in salads, marinades and sandwiches.
"The outside is very decorative," Mazard said. "It looks like the small egg of a quail; it's exactly the same size -- roughly -- to the quail eggs."
European chefs have been thinly slicing the fruits and pairing them with kumquats, among other things, he said.
In Britain, the Daily Mail reported that a box of approximately 50 pepquiños sell for $15. Mazard said the price of the tiny melons stateside have yet to be determined.
America will get its first taste in June -- most likely limited to specialty shops in the New York metropolitan area.
"We're going to have a very small production this summer," Mazard said. "It's a seasonal product, so we just started to have the first seeds from Europe because we are the only producers in the world to have this variety of small cucumber. We're going to have it ready [for] food production seriously in 2010."