Another new discovery for me in India. I’m not entirely sure of its name, but I think I have been eating a red custard apple or ramphal.
At the end of April, I was buying some soft drinks from a shop in Chinchurakanapalli village near the Clover Greens golf course. The shopkeeper said that she had never spoken to any golfers before. She then sent her brother clambering up a tree to pick a red fruit as a gift to me – I guess in response to the novelty value of having a female, foreign, golfer in her shop.
The fruit tasted like a custard apple, with a sweet creamy texture and large seeds. But I’ve only seen them with a green skin, not red.
Has anyone seen a fruit like this? Or was I eating from some strange mutant tree?
UPDATE in 2015: If you read the comments below, you will see that people have suggested other names for this fruit, like sitaphal, bullock’s heart, sharifa and atha palam. So there must be more than one tree with this fruit after all!
Distant Drumlin 
Hi! Looks yummy but I have never seen anything like that…what was the taste like? more apple or more mango?
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Not apple, not mango, but more like strawberry ice cream!
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wow! Now I am really hoping someone can enlighten us on its name…
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i got another type here also with red color…
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I don’t know about the outside, but the inside looks like a custard apple (Sitaphal). However, the outside of a Sitaphal looks different from your picture – it is green and covered in bumps.
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Thanks for giving me the word “sitaphal”…..but the mystery continues about the red skin.
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Never seen a red one before! Nice.
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Never seen a red one myself… but I googled it and found many photographs. If you are in the northern part of India, custard apple is called ‘sharifa’. Asking for ‘sitaphal’ may get you a pumpkin 🙂
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That’s funny – there’s a big difference between a pumpkin and a custard apple!
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Thanks for stopping by and checking out my blog. That gave me the opportunity to visit yours. I enjoyed your writing and pictures – the custard apple sounds very tasty! Since India is on my bucket list at some point I’ll be back for sure to read more… Anita @ No Particular Place To Go
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Ramphal or bullock’s-heart is a fruit from the same family as Custard Apple. They taste more or less the same. But Bullock’s Heart has fewer and larger seeds compared to the custard apple ones.
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Thank you for the comment Nimi. Maybe my fruit was a Bullock’s Heart.
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Hey Karolyn,
After seeing this pic, I remember In my childhood I ate this fruit a lot. In Tamil language its called as ” ATHA PALAM”. Only on village side of south India you can get this fruit. Regular custard apple(Sitaphal) is very tasty than Red custard apple. Red custard apple is very thin outside and creamy inside with few big seeds.
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Thank you AnT. Yes I think you are right, we are both talking about the same fruit. This one had a thin skin, creamy flesh and big seeds. And it was growing on a tree in a village close to the border between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
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Makes me want to eat it! I love custard apples…. game for the red!
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It similar fruit like seethaPalam/laxmaPalam. It was called RamaPalam.
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Thank you! Is the name RamaPalam used in the Telugu language or Tamil or other South Indian languages?
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Hi Karolyn ,
I was happy to see you dropped by. When checking out the suggested posts of yours, my son recognized this fruit. “So it’s called a Custard Apple… YUCK! We have that on the hill. It tastes like pancake batter.” So our variety is worse… or Akka is just not a fan. Hope you are well and that I see a current post from you soon.
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That’s funny! Do you have a local Fijian name for your variety?
I am fine, busy with various projects that leave my Distant Drumlin blog all ignored and neglected. I must get back to it soon.
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