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Santa Claus melon
Cucumis melo · Melon
40 pairings
The Santa Claus or Christmas melon is a large, elongated winter melon with a green, dark-striped rind and mild, pale green honeydew-like flesh. Famous above all for how long it keeps, it belongs to the smooth-skinned Inodorus group of Cucumis melo, stores for weeks to months, and — because a summer-harvested fruit can still be sound at Christmas — it reaches Northern-Hemisphere markets in the depths of winter, eaten chilled in wedges, cubed into fruit salad, and paired with cured ham.
Picking a good onedrag
Hard, pale, no giveSlack, weeping, sour
Firm, gold comingCubes and balls cleanly — fruit salad, skewers, wedges with serrano ham. Keeps weeks yet.Buy it
Rind colourDeep green ground, gold coming up in the mottling
The two endsStub dry and corky, blossom end springs back
Weight in the handHeavy for its size, dense and solid
Smell at the blossom endNothing, or the barest cucumber-green up close
What to look for, from hard, pale, no give to slack, weeping, sour.
What one gives you
60%
Usable yield
about three-fifths · thick rind and seed cavity out · casaba's figure
2733 g
Typical weight
one specimen
Keeping ittap a band
Below 7 °C the rind pits and darkens in patchy lesions and it stops ripening — a cool larder, not the fridge. The riper the melon, the more cold it takes.
Humidity
90–95%
The hard rind holds water better than most fruit, so it needs no bag; but a month in dry air costs weight and the blossom end goes leathery first.
Airflow
Open, uncovered
Uncovered, air all round, never stacked deep: every scuff on that hard rind turns into a water-soaked patch weeks later. Cut, it inverts: wrap and chill under 5 °C.
Makes almost none, answers to it fast
It gives off almost none itself — half of why it keeps — but ethylene from apples, pears or bananas softens it; the trade gasses winter melons on purpose to ripen them.