Jujube

Two fruits in one stage of drying

Fresh jujubes have an apple-pear flavor with a crisp white flesh and shiny green-to-red skin. Allowed to ripen further on the tree or laid out to dry, they shrivel into wrinkled mahogany “Chinese dates” with a dense, sweet, prune-like flavor. The same fruit produces two distinct culinary products depending on harvest timing.

Most jujubes outside Asian markets are sold dried; fresh jujubes are a regional specialty seasonal in Mediterranean and East Asian markets in late summer.

A 4,000-year medicinal

Jujubes feature heavily in Traditional Chinese Medicine as a tonic ingredient — believed to nourish blood, calm the spirit, and improve digestion. They’re a common addition to Chinese herbal soups (tang) prepared during cold months and after illness. Korean samgyetang (ginseng chicken soup) almost always includes a few jujubes simmered with the chicken.

Sui mein lo candy

The original “jujube” candy was simply dried jujubes coated in sugar — a Chinese confection adapted in 19th-century Europe and America into the rubbery, fruit-flavored gummy candy now sold in movie theaters. The modern Jujubes brand candy contains no actual jujube fruit, just artificial flavoring; the name was borrowed.

Hardy and prolific

Jujube trees tolerate drought, alkaline soils, and temperatures from −15 °C to +50 °C — among the toughest fruit trees in cultivation. Mature trees produce reliably for over 100 years with minimal care, which has made them a fixture of dryland orchards across China, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the American Southwest.