Malenadu Fruits

What are Malenadu fruits?

Malenadu fruits are the fruits that grow in the gardens and forests of the Western Ghats hills of Karnataka, from Uttara Kannada and Shivamogga to Chikkamagaluru, Hassan and Kodagu. Some are planted in every thota (garden) next to areca and pepper, like jackfruit, banana and kokum. Others grow wild along streams and forest edges and are picked by whoever knows where to look.

The fruits of Malenadu have three things in common. Many of them are sour, which is why hill cooking leans on fruit rather than tamarind for souring. Most Malenadu fruits are seasonal and come in a rush, so families have old ways of drying, salting and pickling them. Very few of them reach city markets.

To see where these districts sit, use our map of Malenadu districts and taluks. This page sticks to the fruit.

Malenadu fruits season by season: a month by month table

Most Malenadu fruits ripen between March and July, in the hot weeks before the monsoon and its first rains. Winter belongs to small forest berries, while a few garden trees fruit almost all year. The table below is a rough guide, because altitude, rain and the tree itself can shift any of these by a few weeks.

Month	What is in season
January	Sampige and mullannu berries, halage, bananas
February	Star fruit, sampige, halage, first bilimbi
March	Tender appe midi for pickle, first kokum, raw jackfruit, star fruit, uppage
April	Kokum, jackfruit, mango, nerale, kavale
May	Kokum and jackfruit at their peak, nerale, rose apple, hebbalasu, pineapple
June	Ripe jackfruit, rose apple, hebbalasu, vate huli, pineapple
July	Last jackfruit, vate huli, pineapple
August	Pineapple, star fruit, bilimbi
September	Star fruit, kavale, bilimbi
October	Kavale, bilimbi, bananas
November	Bilimbi, bananas
December	Sampige and mullannu berries, bilimbi, bananas

This calendar of seasonal fruits in Karnataka’s hills runs alongside the farm year. For pepper, areca and paddy in the same months, see the Malenadu crop calendar.

Malenadu jackfruit: halasu from tender to ripe

Malenadu jackfruit, halasu (ಹಲಸು) in Kannada, is the biggest and most used of all Malenadu fruits. Almost every old house has a tree or two. The season runs roughly from March to July and nothing from the tree is wasted.

Families sort jackfruit into two broad kinds. One has firm, crisp bulbs that hold their shape. The other has soft, very sweet and slippery bulbs that melt when ripe.

• Tender fruit: cut green and cooked as palya (a dry stir fry with coconut).
• Raw mature fruit: sliced and fried as chips. It is also ground and rolled into happala (papad) that dries in the sun for the rains.
• Ripe fruit: eaten fresh or ground into sweet halasina kadubu steamed in leaves, payasa and sweet dose.
• Seeds: roasted in the hearth on rainy evenings or added to saaru.
• Leaves: pinned into cups called kotte for steaming kadubu.

Jackfruit chips in the hills are fried in coconut oil, which gives them their smell. The same oil is rubbed on hands and knives before cutting a jackfruit so the white sticky latex wipes off.

Hebbalasu: the wild jack

Hebbalasu (Artocarpus hirsutus) is a wild cousin of jackfruit with small spiky fruits that ripen around May and June. The sweet orange bulbs are eaten raw. It is one of the Malenadu fruits that has become hard to find as old trees are cut.

Kokum fruit (murugalu): the red fruit of summer

Kokum fruit is the round, deep purple red fruit of Garcinia indica, called murugalu (ಮುರುಗಲು) in Kannada. The ICAR Indian Institute of Spices Research notes that it is native to the Western Ghats and ripens between March and May. Its pulp is made into a cooling drink while its rind is dried for cooking.

A fresh kokum fruit is about the size of a small lime. Cut it open and you find a thick red rind around white, juicy pulp and a few seeds. Children in Malenadu eat the sour sweet pulp straight from the fruit and end up with stained fingers.

Here is how the fresh kokum fruit is used in hill homes:

1. Fresh pulp: eaten as it is. It can also be squeezed into water with salt and jaggery for a summer drink.
2. Syrup: the fresh rind is layered with sugar or jaggery in a jar. The sun draws out a dark red syrup that is diluted with water through the year.
3. Dried rind: halves are spread on mats in the hot sun until leathery and dark. This is the murugalu that sours kokum saaru and fish curry all year.
4. Seeds: the seeds give a solid fat that some families still render at home.

The drying happens in April and May, when the sun is strongest and the rains have not started. Of all Malenadu fruits, kokum is the one a family cannot afford to miss, because without those weeks there is no dried kokum until next summer.

Appe midi mango and the wild mangoes of the hills

The appe midi mango is a small wild mango of Malenadu that is picked whole while it is still tender and pickled before the stone forms. “Midi” means a tender young mango in Kannada. The trees grow wild in the forests and along streams of Uttara Kannada and Shivamogga. They are picked around March.

Each tree has its own smell and families know their trees by it. Some appe midi trees smell of cumin while others smell of camphor. The appe midi pickle page explains how the pickle is made and kept for years.

Ripe wild mangoes come in April and May. They are small and fibrous with a sharp sweet taste. In the hills they are squeezed and sucked rather than cut. Ripe ones also go into a sweet and sour mango gojju or saaru, one of the best loved summer dishes made from Malenadu fruits.

Nerale (jamun) and rose apple: Malenadu fruits of the early monsoon

Jamun, called nerale (ನೇರಳೆ) in Kannada, is the small purple black fruit of Syzygium cumini that ripens in the hills around April and May. Trees grow tall near streams and temple tanks. The fruit falls when ripe, so mornings under a nerale tree mean a purple carpet and a purple tongue.

Most people eat nerale fresh with a pinch of salt, which takes off the dry, puckering edge. Children are sent up the tree. Ripe nerale does not keep, so whatever is not eaten in a day or two goes to the neighbours.

Pannerale: the rose apple

Pannerale (ಪನ್ನೇರಳೆ) is the rose apple, Syzygium jambos, a cousin of jamun. Its pale yellow fruits ripen around May and June. They are crisp and hollow, with a smell like rose water. It is a backyard tree rather than a forest one and is eaten fresh.

Vate huli: the monkey jack fruit

Vate huli is the monkey jack fruit, Artocarpus lacucha, a small relative of jackfruit with a knobbly round fruit that turns yellow when ripe. It grows along streams. The trees flower in the cool months and the fruit is gathered through summer into the early monsoon.

The ripe monkey jack fruit is sweet and sour and is eaten fresh. Its real job among Malenadu fruits, though, is souring. The fruit is cut into slices and dried in the sun until leathery. Those dried slices are what hill cooks mean by vate huli.

In Uttara Kannada and Shivamogga homes, dried vate huli sours gojju, saaru and chutneys with a deeper, rounder tang than kokum. Many cooks keep both: kokum for colour and vate huli for depth.

Sour garden fruits of Malenadu: bilimbi and star fruit

Bilimbi and star fruit are two related sour Malenadu fruits that grow in many gardens. Neither is native to India, but both have been grown here for generations and have Kannada names of their own.

Bilimbi (bimbli)

Bilimbi, called bimbli in Kannada, has small green finger shaped fruits that grow straight out of the trunk. According to ICAR’s Indian Horticulture, the tree flowers in February and March and then fruits almost continuously until December. It is too sour to eat raw, so it goes into pickles, chutneys and fish curries in place of tamarind.

Star fruit (darehuli)

Star fruit, darehuli (ದಾರೆಹುಳಿ) in Kannada, is the ridged yellow fruit that makes a star when sliced. The same ICAR article says the fruits mature in August and September and again in February and March. Sweet types are eaten fresh. Sour types are sprinkled with salt and chilli powder or cooked into chutney.

Banana and pineapple: the everyday Malenadu fruits

Banana and pineapple are the most common cultivated Malenadu fruits. Bananas grow in almost every areca garden, while pineapple is a bigger crop in a few taluks.

Banana (bale)

Banana plants line the edges of areca gardens across Malenadu and fruit through the year, the only Malenadu fruits you can count on in every month. Small, sweet elakki bale is the favourite for eating. Larger cooking bananas are used raw for palya and chips. The stem and the flower also go into palya and the leaves become plates for every festival meal.

Pineapple (ananas)

Pineapple grows widely on the slopes of Shivamogga district, especially in Soraba and Sagara taluks. It is also grown in parts of Uttara Kannada. Under natural conditions pineapple in India is harvested from May to August, though staggered planting brings fruit to market for much of the year. In the hills it is eaten fresh with salt and chilli or cooked into a sweet and sour pineapple gojju.

Wild fruits of the Western Ghats: kavale, sampige and more

The wild fruits of the Western Ghats are the forest snacks every Malenadu child grew up picking: small berries, sour pods and sticky drupes that never reach a shop. A Deccan Herald report on forest fruits notes that more than 200 wild fruit species have some human use in Uttara Kannada alone.

These are some of the wild Malenadu fruits that local people still eat:

Kannada name	Botanical name	Rough season	How it is eaten
Kavale (kouli)	Carissa carandas	April to May, September to October	Ripe berries raw, tender ones pickled
Sampige hannu	Flacourtia montana	December to February	Ripe red berries raw
Mullannu	Ziziphus species	December to March	Small wild ber, raw
Halage	Elaeagnus conferta	January to March	Raw, sour and juicy
Ranjalu	Mimusops elengi	March to May	Ripe orange fruit, raw
Hebbalasu	Artocarpus hirsutus	May to June	Sweet bulbs raw, seeds roasted
Uppage	Garcinia gummi-gutta	March to May	Rind dried for souring

Many of these trees are disappearing as forest edges are cleared. Their seasons are short and the fruit does not travel. The only way to taste most wild Malenadu fruits is to be in the hills at the right time.

How are Malenadu fruits preserved?

Malenadu fruits are preserved by drying in the summer sun, salting, pickling and cooking into syrup, because most of them ripen at once and the long monsoon follows. A house that does its summer work right eats from its jars until the next March.

Method	Fruits	What it makes
Sun drying	Kokum, vate huli, uppage, jackfruit	Souring rind, dried slices, happala
Salting	Tender mango, bilimbi	Salt soaked fruit for pickle
Pickling	Appe midi, tender mango, kavale, bilimbi	Spicy pickles that keep for months
Syrup and paste	Kokum, ripe jackfruit	Kokum syrup, thick jackfruit paste
Frying	Raw jackfruit, raw banana	Chips fried in coconut oil

Some families also cook ripe jackfruit pulp down with jaggery into a thick, dark sweet paste that keeps for months. Spoons of it go into payasa and kadubu in the rains. Many families sweeten kokum syrup and jackfruit paste with liquid jaggery instead of sugar.

For the Kannada words used on this page, such as murugalu, vate huli and halasu, see our list of spice and ingredient names in Kannada.

When should you visit Malenadu for its fruits?

Visit in April or May if you want to taste the most Malenadu fruits in one trip. Jackfruit, kokum, mango and nerale all overlap then. Roadside stalls sell them and the hills stay pleasant even when the valleys are hot.

Early June adds rose apple, hebbalasu and the last ripe jackfruit, though leeches and slippery paths come with the first rains. December and January bring the winter forest berries and the most comfortable weather. Our guide on getting from Bangalore to Malenadu has distances and routes to the main fruit growing towns.

Taste more of Malenadu food

The Malenadu fruits on this page show up all through the hill kitchen, from kokum saaru to jackfruit kadubu. Start with our Malenadu food guide for the full meal and its seasons. Our kokum rind and monkey jack powder bring the two great sour fruits of the hills to your kitchen all year.

Frequently asked questions about Malenadu fruits