Champola de Guanábana

Ingredients

• 600 g ripe soursop (guanábana) pulp, from about 1 medium fruit
• 750 ml cold whole milk
• 1 small tin evaporated milk — optional
• 4 tbsp sugar, to taste
• 1 lime, juiced
• a scrape of nutmeg to finish — optional

Method

1. Pick a ripe fruit and open it

   The soursop should give softly under your thumb like a ripe avocado and smell sweet at the stem; a firm one is starchy and no amount of sugar fixes it. Split it lengthways and scoop the white pulp into a bowl.

2. Take out every seed and the core

   Work the pulp apart with your fingers and pull out all the black seeds and the fibrous central core, counting as you go if you have to. The seeds are genuinely inedible — they are toxic and bitter, and a single one caught in the blades will poison the whole jug with bitterness.

3. Blend briefly

   Put the cleaned pulp, the cold milk, the evaporated milk and the sugar in the blender and pulse for no more than fifteen or twenty seconds, just until smooth. Over-blending shears the remaining fibre and whatever seed fragments you missed and turns a sweet drink sharply bitter within a minute — champola is blended short on purpose.

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4. Taste and adjust

   Add the lime juice a little at a time and taste — it is there to lift the milk, not to be tasted as lime. Sweeten further only if the fruit was underripe, since a good guanábana carries most of the sugar itself.

5. Serve immediately, very cold

   Pour over ice into tall glasses and grate a little nutmeg on top. Champola separates and dulls within about half an hour, so make it when you are ready to drink it rather than in advance.