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Winter melon
Benincasa hispida · Melon
40 pairings
Winter melon (Benincasa hispida), also called wax gourd, ash gourd, white gourd or tung kua, is a large oblong-to-round gourd of the cucumber family, ripening to a pale blue-green skin coated in a chalky white wax. Its watery, mild, faintly sweet white flesh has little flavour of its own and is prized in East and Southeast Asian cooking as a near-neutral vegetable for clear soups, braises, stir-fries and the translucent candied sweet winter-melon strips.
Shop firmThe all-rounder: clear soups, braises, stir-fries, candied strips.Everyday best
BloomBloom patchy where hands have been
Rind under a nailNail marks it, will not pierce
Stem scarStub gone, scar dry and closed
Smell at the scarFaint clean green at the scar
What to look for, from cured hard, bloom intact to bare, soft-spotted, weeping.
What one gives you
71%
Usable yield
5.7 kg of flesh - rind, stem and seedy core off
8028 g
Typical weight
one specimen
55%
Juice yield
About 550 ml a kilo
Keeping ittap a band
Below 13 C the rind pits and waterlogs, so a whole gourd keeps worse in the fridge than on a cool shelf; a cut wedge is the exception, so wrap and chill that.
Humidity
70-85%
The waxed rind barely transpires, so damp is the risk, not drying: condensation on a gourd brought in from the cold is where the rot starts.
Airflow
Open and airy
A slatted shelf or a board, never a bag and never bare damp concrete; the trapped moisture under the fruit is where the first soft patch starts.
No figures either way
Picked fully mature, it ripens no further off the vine, and no handbook records it either way: apples beside it neither hurry it along nor are hurried by it.