Last week I saw a guy selling fruit on the street, including one that I haven’t seen before. It was round, about the size of a large apple, greenish-brown in color. I asked the guy what it was and he said it was “sapotí.” I remembered that this was on of the fruits I was told about the same night I heard about jatobá. I asked how much, he said it was R$4 each. I thought this was pretty pricey and wondered if this included the gringo tax, but in the interest of science I got one. I also asked the guy what the fruit tasted like. He hesitated, then said it was sort of like chocolate.

When I got back home I googled about sapotí, as I now always do since the cashew incident. I found that “sapoti” may refer to manilkara zapota, which is also known as “sapotilla” or “nispero” (not to be confused with nespera). However, while some of the sites describing manilkara zapota had a picture that matched the fruit that I had in front of me, others had a rather different one: elongated, with larger seeds. To make it even more confusing, a search for “chocolate fruit” took me to a description of a fruit with a similar name, “black sapote” (also known as “black persimmon”), which belonged to a different family (the genus is diospyros digyna) and looked nothing like my sapotí. Black sapote supposedly does actually taste like chocolate, my fruit didn’t. I figured that it must be that at R$4 a piece the guy who was selling the fruit didn’t actually get to taste it.

While it was black sapote and not my “sapotilla” that was a relative of persimmon, it did roughly taste like persimmon – soft, juicy, slightly tarty. It was tasty and I would get it again, though probably not for R$4 a piece.