How to cook with durian?

Durian is more than a fruit you eat raw off the husk. Ripe, it is soft and rich enough to drop straight into desserts. Left under-ripe, it firms into a starchy ingredient you can cook down savory. Even the seeds most people throw out turn edible, and pretty good, once you cook them properly.

I grow Monthong, Musang King and a D2 outside San Diego, and after a heavy week of eating I am left with more flesh, and a far bigger pile of seeds, than any household should waste. The kitchen at Exotic Fruits and Vegetables runs on durian for half the season, so I have cooked most of what can be done with it. Here is what holds up.

Start with the ripe flesh, where durian behaves most like a dessert ingredient.

Cooking the ripe flesh

Ripe durian is soft and sweet enough to need almost no help in a dessert. It carries cakes and smoothies with ease, and churns into a dense ice cream. The creamier the fruit, the less sugar you have to add.

The benchmark dish is durian sticky rice, khao niao thurian. You steam glutinous rice, warm durian flesh in coconut milk sweetened with palm sugar and scented with pandan, cook that sauce until it thickens, and spoon it hot over the rice. Roti durian does the same trick in a pan, with puree folded into fried flatbread.

Heat is where cooks lose the flavor they wanted in the first place.

Add durian flesh late and keep the heat gentle, because long, hot cooking boils off the aroma you are cooking for. For anything baked or simmered, I fold the durian in near the end, or drop the oven temperature, so the smell that carries the dish survives the cooking.

Frozen flesh is my everyday cooking stock, since home freezing softens the texture in a way that vanishes once it is blended or baked. I keep 200 gram pucks and thaw one whenever a recipe calls for durian.

Because a single fruit gives less usable flesh than its weight suggests, scaling a recipe up for a crowd takes some math. Working out the flesh you need and the cost per serving keeps a durian dessert from quietly blowing the budget.

The savory side, and the seeds

Under-ripe durian is a different ingredient. Firm and starchy rather than creamy, it holds up in soups and curries, or fried with onion and chili as a side dish. The firmer flesh keeps its shape where a ripe fruit would collapse into the pan.

Stuck with a durian that never ripened past crunchy? Rather than force it into a dessert where it will taste green and hard, why not cook it down savory, the way Southeast Asian kitchens have long used the firmer fruit in curries and stir-fries?

The bigger surprise sits under the flesh. Durian seeds are edible, and they are worth eating, though only after they are cooked.

Raw durian seeds are toxic; boil them at least 15 minutes or roast them until brown before eating. Uncooked, they carry cyclopropene fatty acids and oxalate, which heat breaks down. The cooked seed tastes like a waxy potato or a roasted chestnut, with none of the fruit’s smell.

Cooking them is simple once you have saved a handful of durian seeds:

1. Wash every scrap of sticky pulp off the seeds so they do not gum up in the pot.
2. Boil them in salted water for 15 to 30 minutes, until a fork slides in easily.
3. Cool them, then peel off the brown outer coat to reach the pale inner seed.
4. Eat them as they are, or roast the peeled seeds until they caramelize at the edges.
5. Keep cooked seeds in the fridge and use them within a couple of days.

Once cooked, the seeds behave like any starchy tuber in the kitchen.

A week of durian left me with a full bowl of seeds last summer, so I boiled the lot. They went into a curry in place of potato and thickened the sauce as they softened, and the rest I roasted and salted for snacking. Nothing about them reads as durian, which is the whole appeal for anyone who loves the seed but not the flesh.

Here are a few ways I put them to work:

• Boiled and cubed into curries or stews, where their starch thickens the sauce.
• Roasted and salted for snacking straight from the tray.
• Sliced thin and deep-fried into crisp chips.
• Mashed or ground into a starchy base for gluten-free baking.

What pairs, and what to avoid

Durian leans on rich, sweet partners. Coconut milk and palm sugar are the traditional match, dairy carries it in cheesecakes and ice cream, and a little salt or pandan sharpens the flavor without fighting it. Chili and shallots pull it toward the savory end. One pairing, though, is a genuine problem.

Never wash durian down with alcohol, since compounds in the fruit block your body from clearing it and can bring on nausea and a racing heart. The old Southeast Asian warning against durian with beer or spirits has chemistry behind it, so keep the drinks soft when durian is on the table.

If you are building a menu around durian, it helps to check which flavors lift it and which clash, and the same check flags the pairings worth avoiding for comfort and safety.

How I cook with my own durian

Ripe Monthong goes into sticky rice and ice cream, folded in late so the aroma actually lands on the plate. Under-ripe or watery fruit I cook savory, and every seed gets boiled rather than binned.

Treat durian as three ingredients hiding in one shell and it earns far more of its price than a single raw sitting gives you. Handle the ripe flesh gently and the firm fruit like a vegetable, and never eat a raw seed. Do that, and almost nothing from the husk goes to waste.