August usually still means hot summer weather and mango season should be in full swing. I have a running joke that we have two seasons in Hawaii — rain or sunshine, or get mango and no more mango season. Usually by now, we have lots of pickled green mango and lychee for sale as well. The hottest days produce fruit that are the sweetest. Even the pineapples, which are available year-round now are the sweetest. We used a refractometer in the restaurant to measure the Brix level, or sugar level, of fruit or anything sweet. In the summer, we get pineapples over 20 Brix, as compared to the winter, when it’s 8-12 Brix. Export pineapples are around 8-10 Brix. Our pineapple martini had to measure out to 15 Brix before we would serve it to our guests. It is all about how long the days are and how much sunshine we get, it’s part of our terroir (taste the land).
Back to mangoes. I think we have some of the best-tasting mangoes on the planet. My favorite are the Haydens from Makaha Mango Farm out in Waianae. Mark and Candy Suiso produce many varieties of mango: Keitt, Pope, Rapoza, Mapulehu, Irwin, Pirie, Brooks, Gouveia.
I grew up thinking that we had good mangoes. They were in our neighbor’s yard and hung over the fence into our yard, so technically it was our mangoes (this will always be a debate among locals). They happened to be Hayden, and the other types I knew about were Chinese, Cigar and Pirie. The bottom line is that a mango is not just a mango, there are so many types. They all have their own nuances, aromas, textures and tastes.
Sometimes, we cook with mangoes. As a rule of thumb, don’t waste any part of the mango; when you get trimmings, put them into the freezer and when you accumulate enough you can at least make some mango bread or muffins, may be a sauce for ice cream or a dessert. The best mangoes to bake with are Piries. They have a perfume that can survive the cooking and you still smell the mango. We once had a dish called Mango Mango Mango — mango vinaigrette, mango relish and mango barbecue sauce on grilled chicken — to feature mangoes in their own season in Hawaii.
I hope that everyone either has had or will have this experience at least once, especially during mango season. Peel the skin off a ripe mango with a small paring knife. Go to the sink, devour the mango with your bare hands and teeth, juices dripping off your cheeks and down onto your chin, and enjoy the full flavor of this beautiful fruit. Just be careful of the seed in the middle. Sometimes in the kitchen I see cooks dice up the mango into small cubes a quarter inch square. They use this as a dessert garnish or part of a salsa or relish. It’s pretty, but doesn’t give the full flavor of what the mango can give.
I cannot help but remember one of the things I created a long time ago — an aha moment that unlocked the creativity door of using local ingredients. I was teaching a class at Kapiolani Community College, and a student brought me a jar of pickled mango from her mom. I was doing a demo on emulsified salad dressings with a blender. What happened next was “pickled mango vinaigrette.”
The resulting dish was a grilled chicken breast with pickled mango vinaigrette. I asked myself, if I could make a dressing from a French recipe using pickled mango, what else could I make with local ingredients using the French technique I had learned? It would become the beginning of “Taste Hawaii” for me, for a long time serving you.
Chef and restaurateur Alan Wong has wowed diners around the world for decades, and is known as one of the founders of Hawaii Regional Cuisine. Find his column in Crave every first Wednesday. Currently, Wong is dba Alan Wong’s Consulting Co.
