Overview
About Surinam cherry
Surinam cherry is not a cherry.
Eugenia uniflora is a myrtle, sitting in the same family as guava, feijoa, clove and allspice, and the ribbed little fruit it drops has nothing to do with Prunus beyond being red and roughly cherry sized. That family membership is the flavour story as much as the naming one: the fruit is dense with volatile terpenes, which is why an underripe one tastes frankly of turpentine and why even a ripe one strikes some people as resinous or soapy. What comes out of that is a practical ripeness rule rather than an intolerance warning. Eat them fully coloured, deep red through to almost black, and leave the orange ones a few more days on the tree, because the unripe fruit is resinous enough to sit badly on a stomach. Ripe, the graded triggers are quiet: clean for histamine content, tyramine, sulfites, nitrites, free glutamates, gluten, lactose and nightshade, and only mildly elevated for salicylates, oxalate, nickel and histamine liberation.
Sensitivities
How Surinam cherry scores
Watch for
What trips people up
- Ripeness is the whole practical rule with this fruit. Green and orange pitanga are astringent and heavily resinous and are widely reported to cause stomach upset, while a properly ripe one is soft enough to drop into your hand at a touch. The dark-fruited cultivars, sold as black or purple pitanga, are markedly sweeter and less resinous than the ordinary red, and are the ones to seek out if the turpentine note has put you off
- Do not eat the seed. The one or two seeds inside are intensely bitter and resinous, and they carry the strongest concentration of the turpentine character. Spit them out rather than putting whole fruit into a blender, which is the usual way people end up with a resinous smoothie they cannot drink
- Its relatives are guava, feijoa, jaboticaba, clove and allspice, not stone fruit. If Myrtaceae fruits or the clove and allspice spices are already on your avoid list for any reason, file this fruit with them rather than with cherries, because the name is the only thing it shares with a cherry
- Mild histamine liberator grade against clean histamine content. The bigger real-world variable is that pitanga bruises and ferments quickly in the heat where it grows and is rarely refrigerated at a roadside sale. A soft, winey fruit has moved on from what these grades describe
- FODMAP columns are unrated rather than low, so a bowlful is an unmapped portion. The leaves are a separate matter entirely: they are used as a traditional tea and strewn as an insect repellent, and nothing here characterises a leaf infusion
Diet fit
Where it fits
Swap ideas
More alternatives
FAQ
Common questions about Surinam cherry
Is Surinam cherry safe to eat?
The ripe fruit is, and it has been a dooryard fruit across Brazil, the Caribbean and Florida for a very long time. The caution attaches to the unripe fruit and to the seeds. Green and orange pitanga are strongly resinous and astringent and have a long-standing reputation for causing stomach upset, and the seeds are bitter and resinous enough that they should be spat out rather than swallowed or blended. Wait until the fruit is deep red or nearly black and comes away from the stalk with almost no pull, and it is an easy fruit.
Is Surinam cherry actually a cherry?
Not remotely. It is Eugenia uniflora, a member of the myrtle family, whose better-known relatives are guava, feijoa, jaboticaba, allspice and clove. A true cherry is a Prunus, in the rose family alongside plum, peach and almond. The two share a colour, a size and a stone, and nothing else. If you avoid stone fruit for any reason, that reason does not extend to pitanga, and if you react to Myrtaceae spices, this fruit is the one to watch rather than the cherries.
Why does my Surinam cherry taste like turpentine?
Because it is full of terpenes, and because it was probably picked early. Eugenia uniflora is unusually rich in volatile sesquiterpenes, the compounds that give the myrtle family its resinous, spicy character, and they dominate the flavour of a fruit that is not yet ripe. As the fruit turns from orange through red to near black the sugars rise and that resin note recedes. Cultivar matters too: the dark-fruited selections are bred specifically to be less resinous, and many people who dislike the common red type get on fine with those.
Is Surinam cherry high in histamine?
The fruit itself grades A for histamine content and A for tyramine, so there are no stored amines to speak of, and its only histamine entry is a mild liberator grade. The realistic risk is freshness rather than chemistry. Pitanga is a thin-skinned fruit in a hot climate that goes over within a day or two of ripening and is often sold unrefrigerated, and a fruit that has started to ferment is a genuinely different amine exposure from one picked that morning.
References
Read the background
Ratings reflect the Triggerbites ingredient database and may vary with portion size and preparation.