Acai
A small dark purple Amazonian palm berry that briefly conquered Western health foods in the 2000s — the actual fruit is mostly pit, with a thin, oily, antioxidant-rich pulp.
48 fruits containing the letter C — each with origin, classification, and notes.
Below are fruits that contain the letter C anywhere in the name. Each of the 48 fruits below opens to a full profile.
A small dark purple Amazonian palm berry that briefly conquered Western health foods in the 2000s — the actual fruit is mostly pit, with a thin, oily, antioxidant-rich pulp.
A small bright-red Caribbean cherry-like fruit packed with extraordinarily high vitamin C — used in juices and supplements rather than fresh eating because of its short shelf life.
A West African red-skinned fruit that opens to reveal yellow custard-textured arils — the national fruit of Jamaica, but lethally toxic if eaten before fully ripe.
A small, thick-skinned wild African citrus with intensely fragrant peel and tart pulp — used more for marmalade and traditional medicine than fresh eating.
An odd umbrella-leafed forest plant with a single yellow fruit hidden under its canopy — edible only when fully ripe, and toxic in every other part.
A small velvet-skinned orange stone fruit with a brief season — eaten fresh, dried, or jammed across cuisines from Persian to Provençal.
A creamy single-seeded berry from Central America, beloved for its buttery flesh and unusually high content of monounsaturated fats.
A green-skinned Mexican fruit whose ripe interior turns into a thick chocolate-pudding-like brown mash — eaten with a spoon or used as a vegan chocolate substitute.
A glossy black aggregate fruit of bramble vines — fierce wild thickets across temperate regions and the most-foraged fruit in many countries, with intense sweet-tart flavor and abundant seeds.
A small intensely-flavored European berry that's a household staple in Britain and Eastern Europe but virtually unknown in the US — banned for decades to protect the timber industry.
A magenta-fleshed prickly cactus fruit (also called prickly pear or tuna) with a sweet melon-watermelon flavor — heavily harvested in Mexico, Sicily, and the American Southwest.
A tiny citrus from Southeast Asia — a cross between mandarin orange and kumquat, producing a small round fruit with orange flesh and a thin green skin; intensely sour with aromatic orange notes, indispensable in Filipino and Malaysian cooking.
A bright orange Caribbean fruit (also called egg-fruit) with the dry mealy texture of a hard-boiled egg yolk — eaten fresh, in shakes, or as a chilled custard.
An orange-fleshed netted melon — the muskmelon of summer markets, named after a papal estate in Italy, eaten chilled with prosciutto or as a breakfast staple.
A bred-for-extreme chili pepper that held the Guinness record as the world's hottest from 2013 to 2023, with an averaged 1.6 million Scoville heat units.
An Australian rainforest citrus whose elongated finger-shaped fruits burst with translucent pearl-like vesicles — a high-end garnish that exploded in popularity with molecular cuisine.
A close cousin of jackfruit grown across Malaysia and Indonesia — smaller, sweeter, more pungent, and rarely seen outside Southeast Asia because of its overpowering smell.
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.
A small stone fruit of the rose family, with sweet eating varieties and tart pie varieties — pitted and bright in pies, preserves, and liqueurs.
Another name for sapodilla — a small brown Mexican-Filipino fruit with grainy sweet flesh tasting of brown sugar and pear, tied to the same tree that produces chicle (chewing-gum sap).
A diverse family of fiery fruits from the Capsicum genus — used fresh, dried, smoked, ground, and fermented across nearly every world cuisine.
The ancient ancestor of all citrus fruits — a large, rough-skinned yellow fruit valued more for its thick, fragrant pith and essential oil than its sparse, acidic juice; the etrog used in Jewish Sukkot ritual and the source of candied peel worldwide.
A small, easy-peeling, seedless winter mandarin — accidentally created in an Algerian orphanage garden in 1902, now the most popular winter snack citrus in Western countries.
A rare orange-amber Arctic berry that grows in remote bogs across the boreal north — Scandinavia's most prized wild berry, with no commercial cultivation despite decades of attempts.
The largest seed in the plant kingdom — a giant Seychelles double-coconut weighing up to 25 kg, so rare that each individual fruit is government-tracked.
The seed of a tropical palm, technically a drupe rather than a nut, source of oil, milk, water, flesh, and one of the most-used ingredients in tropical cooking.
The wild ancestor of all cultivated apples — small, intensely sour or bitter fruits from wild and ornamental trees, generally too harsh to eat raw but exceptional for making jelly, cider, and crab apple wine; the pectin-rich juice gels easily and the flavour — honeyed, floral, and tart — is unlike any cultivated apple.
A small, intensely tart red berry of North American wetlands — turned into Thanksgiving sauce by colonial Americans and into urinary-tract-infection folklore by mid-20th-century medicine.
The botanical name for falsa — a small purple South Asian summer berry, also known as Phalsa, used in cooling drinks and Ayurvedic medicine across the subcontinent.
A wild dark berry of the western North American mountains — beloved by hikers, hunted by bears, and impossible to cultivate, sustaining a regional Pacific Northwest jam-and-pie economy.
A Brazilian wonder fruit that grows directly on the trunk and branches of its tree — dark purple berries that look like grapes glued onto bark, with mild grape-lychee flavor and a brief shelf life.
The largest tree-borne fruit in the world — up to 35 kg — with sweet yellow flesh when ripe and a meaty texture used as a vegan meat substitute when unripe.
A subtropical Peruvian fruit with pale yellow flesh, a sweet flavour of maple, sweet potato, and vanilla combined, and very low sugar content despite its sweetness — a pre-Inca sacred fruit now popularised as a health-food sweetener globally.
A small Chinese fruit with rough red shell and translucent white flesh of perfumed sweetness — a 2,000-year-old delicacy referenced in Chinese poetry and one of the most prized tropical fruits.
A small West African red berry that **temporarily makes sour foods taste sweet** — chewing one transforms lemon and vinegar into sugary treats for about an hour.
A bumpy bright-orange East Asian fruit (also called luo han guo or monk fruit) — its concentrated extract has become a popular zero-calorie sweetener that's hundreds of times sweeter than sugar.
The fruit of the Swiss cheese plant — a fragrant tropical curiosity that ripens over 12 months, tastes like pineapple-banana, and is mildly toxic until fully ripe.
A smooth-skinned variant of the peach, the same species genetically with one gene difference, often slightly more tart and aromatic than its fuzzy cousin.
A fuzzy-skinned stone fruit of the rose family with sweet aromatic flesh and a single woody pit, originating in China and now grown in temperate orchards worldwide.
A 50/50 plum-apricot hybrid created by Luther Burbank in the 1880s — the original parent of pluots, apriums, and the entire modern stone-fruit hybrid family.
A pear-shaped, fragrant, hard-fleshed fruit eaten almost exclusively cooked — the basis of Spanish *membrillo* paste and a foundational ingredient in Mediterranean and Persian sweets.
A small, jewel-like red berry — translucent, intensely tart, and a classic Northern European garden fruit used in jellies, sauces for game, and showcase dessert garnishes.
A thorny coastal shrub producing dense clusters of tiny bright orange berries — extraordinarily rich in vitamin C (ten times more than oranges), omega-7 fatty acids, and carotenoids; the astringent, intensely sour berries are too sharp to eat raw but make vivid orange juice, jams, and syrups popular across Northern Europe and Russia.
North America's versatile wild fruit — small, blueberry-sized purple-red berries from the Amelanchier shrub/tree, with a sweet, almond-flavoured flesh beloved by birds and foragers; also called Juneberry, Saskatoon, or Shadbush.
A small red ribbed Brazilian backyard fruit (also called pitanga) with intense complex flavor between cherry, raspberry, and tropical resin — extreme polarity between underripe (terrible) and ripe (delicious).
Britain's most beloved plum — a large, oval, red-yellow plum with sweet yellow flesh and a clingstone; named after Queen Victoria, and accounting for the majority of all plum trees grown in British gardens and orchards.
A pale translucent variety of redcurrant — sweeter, less acidic, eaten fresh more than its red sibling, and once a fixture of Victorian dessert tables for its jewel-like appearance.
Botanically a fruit (a *pepo* berry) though treated culinarily as a vegetable, the zucchini is the most-grown summer squash and a green-skinned, tender-fleshed kitchen workhorse.
Try fruits that start with C, or end with C. Or browse the full fruits index.