A heart-shaped Andean fruit with green dimpled skin and creamy custard-like flesh — described by Mark Twain as "the most delicious fruit known to men," with a flavor that combines banana, pineapple, and strawberry.
“The most delicious fruit”
Mark Twain, after eating cherimoya in Honolulu in 1866, called it “the most delicious fruit known to men” in Following the Equator. The reputation has held — cherimoya consistently appears on lists of the world’s best-tasting fruits, despite its limited commercial reach.
The flavor is genuinely complex: a base of vanilla custard, with notes of banana, pineapple, papaya, and strawberry — sometimes peach, sometimes mango. Each bite tastes slightly different.
How to eat one
A ripe cherimoya yields gently to pressure, like a peach. The skin is inedible (and slightly toxic) but easy to peel away or simply scoop the flesh out from a halved fruit.
The flesh is full of large hard black seeds — about 30 per fruit, the size of small beans, scattered through the flesh. The seeds are toxic if chewed; spit them out whole.
Andean heritage
Cherimoya has been cultivated for thousands of years in the Andean highlands. The fruit appears in pre-Columbian Peruvian pottery and textile patterns. It thrives at moderate elevations (800–2,000 m) in mild climates — too warm for it to flourish in tropical lowlands, too cold for it in subtropical valleys.
Modern cultivation
Today, the largest commercial production is in Spain (Granada region) — counterintuitive for a South American fruit, but the Spanish microclimates suit it. California and Hawaii grow some; Latin America retains traditional cultivation. Cherimoyas don’t ship well, so most consumption is local or regional.
A genus of relatives
Cherimoya’s genus Annona contains several other notable fruits: soursop (A. muricata), sweetsop / sugar-apple (A. squamosa), atemoya (a hybrid of cherimoya and sweetsop), and custard apple (A. reticulata). All share the creamy, slightly sweet flesh and large dark seeds.