What to do with Graviola

One of the things that first excited me about Brazilian food was the huge variety of fruits available here. I would stare with wide eyes at the huge lists of weird and wonderful sounding fruit in the Casas de suco (juice bars).

Hmmm, decisions decisions…

One of the fruits that I loved from my first taste is called Graviola (Annona muricata). It has a bunch of other names such as Soursop and Guanábana, but let’s stick with the name used most commonly here in Brazil. It’s quite an impressive beast – large, green and spiky!

Graviola – spiky, green, delicious!

When you cut one of these fellows open you will find white flesh and fairly large black seeds.

Blitz the flesh in a blender with some water and some sugar if you want, pour the juice through a sieve and you’ve got a a delicious drink!

So, another delicious tropical fruit – end of story, right? Well, not quite!

Graviola: Cures Cancer?

If you Google “graviola” you will see a lot of excited talk about cancer cures. In fact if you delve into the murky (and quite frankly, despicable) world of people selling ‘alternative’ cancer treatments, you’ll find people making some very wild claims about this fruit.

This very well-balanced and sober article gives you a fair summary of the reasons behind all these claims: “In laboratory studies, graviola extracts can kill some types of liver and breast cancer cells that are resistant to particular chemotherapy drugs.” 

However, there have been no wide-scale human studies and US Federal Trade Commission has stated that there is no evidence to suggest that graviola “can prevent, cure, or treat cancer of any kind.”

Graviola: Gives you Parkinson’s?

On the other side of the coin, there was actually a study which suggested that consuming very large quantities of this fruit could actually cause a form of atypical Parkinson’s Syndrome due to high levels of a neurotoxin in the seeds. This has since been contradicted by more recent studies.

Graviola Cocktail!

So, in summary, Graviola doesn’t cure cancer (booo!) and it won’t give you Parkinson’s (hooray!). What it will do is give you a delicious cocktail! And the best bit is that it’s really simple. Here’s my recipe:

Put 50ml cachaça in a glass.

Add 200ml of graviola juice and generous squeeze of lime juice.

Add one generous teaspoon of leite condensado (condensed milk). Stir really well.

Add ice cubes. If you are fancy, put it in a cocktail shaker and shake. Otherwise just give it a good stir. Add a slice of lime and enjoy your drink!