Meet the Salak, the Ubiquitous Indonesian Fruit You’ve Never Heard Of

It is a very short-stemmed palm, with leaves up to 6 metres (20 ft) long; each leaf has a 2-metre long petiole with spines up to 15 centimetres (5.9 in) long, and numerous leaflets. The fruits grow in clusters at the base of the palm, and are also known as snake fruit due to the reddish-brown scaly skin. They are about the size and shape of a ripe fig, with a distinct tip. The pulp is edible. The fruit can be peeled by pinching the tip, which should cause the skin to slough off so it can be pulled away.
Salak Bali is commonly sold all over the island of Bali, and is a popular fruit with both locals and tourists. The fruit is roughly the size of a large fig, and has a crunchy and moist consistency. The fruit has a starchy 'mouth feel', and a flavour reminiscent of dilute pineapple and lemon juice.
The most expensive cultivar of the Bali salak is the gula pasir (literally "sand sugar" or "grain sugar", referring to its fine-grainedness), which is smaller than the normal salak and is the sweetest of all salak.

Salak gula pasir or also known as Sugar salak which known for its juicy sweetness sometimes fermented into Salak wine which has an alcohol content of 13.5 percent, similar to traditional wine made from grapes.

At a morning market in Bali, the usual gaudy suspects – papayas, mangos, dragon fruit and heaps of rancid-smelling durians - are on display. For Western visitors seeking culinary novelty, however, the most enticing fruit likely will not be the biggest or the brightest, but a humble, shiny brown offering called the salak. For the uninitiated, this fleshy, spongey morsel offers a perfumed cocktail of bright flavors, with hints of pineapple, citrus, honey and possibly even soap.

In Indonesia, salaks are as common as apples or oranges in the U.S. Also called snakefruit, this strawberry-sized, fig-shaped fruit comes encased in vivid, nutty-brown scales, not unlike that of a cobra or python. Heaps of salaks turn up daily at countless local markets, while touristy hotels offer them up in breakfast buffet lines as examples of typical island fare. The odd but ubiquitous morsels can be boiled with sugar into a sweet spread, pickled, vacuum dried and fried into chips or paired with other fruits and nuts, but locals prefer them best raw and straight off the tree.

 

Salaks grow in bundles on palm-like plants with vicious spiked leaves and stems, and Indonesians often surround their yards with the primordial bushes, which double as purveyors of tasty treats and deterrents to would-be trespassers. On Java, traditional dancers whip themselves into a trance in the “Kuda Lumping” dance, then stomp upon or lick salak leaves to show their immunity to pain.

Around 30 types of snakefruits grow throughout their native Indonesia, but the islands of Bali and Java vie for the best salak around. Naturally, locals tend to swear by their own island fruit’s superiority, but for foreigners all bets are off, and preference is simply a matter of taste. The Javanese variety, or salak pondoh,  is the more obnoxiously aromatic of the two varieties. This intense fruit walks a fine line of ripeness that is so volatile that it will often become overripe and sweaty even before it reaches maturation.