Ingredient

Melon

Melons are the fruit most often bought on hope. They are large, expensive, and impossible to inspect inside, and the standard advice about tapping them is close to useless. There is one reliable test and it takes two seconds.

The test that works

Smell the stem end — the scar where the melon was cut from the vine. A ripe melon smells sweet, musky and unmistakably of melon there. An unripe one smells of nothing, or faintly of cucumber.

This works because melons in the cantaloupe and galia groups detach naturally from the vine when ripe, and the aromatic compounds concentrate at that end. It is the single most reliable check available to a shopper.

The other useful signal is weight. A melon should feel heavy for its size, which means it is full of juice rather than air. Tapping tells you very little, and the sound people are listening for varies by variety, thickness of rind and how much they want to buy it.

The four you will meet

Cantaloupe

Netted grey-green rind, deep orange flesh, strongly perfumed. The most aromatic of the common melons.

Charentais

Small, smooth, grey-green with faint ribs, dense orange flesh. French, the best of the lot, and the most likely to be genuinely good.

Galia

Netted rind that turns from green to gold as it ripens, pale green flesh. Colour is a genuine ripeness indicator in this one.

Honeydew

Smooth pale rind, pale green flesh, low aroma, high sugar. Keeps longest and tastes least of anything.

Watermelon

A different plant entirely — see its own page. The rules here do not apply to it.

What to do with a disappointing one

It happens, and the fruit is too expensive to bin.

• Salt it. A little flaky salt on melon makes it taste dramatically sweeter and is standard practice in much of the world.
• With prosciutto or another cured meat, the classic Italian pairing, which does the same job on a larger scale.
• With mint and lime, which supplies the aroma the fruit lacks.
• In a chilled soup with cucumber and a little chilli, which turns a bland melon into a genuinely good starter.
• Blitzed and frozen into a granita with lime juice.
• In a salad with feta, olives and red onion, where salt and acid carry it.
• Pickled rind, which is traditional in the American South and works with any thick-rinded melon.

Storing and cutting

1. Keep a whole uncut melon at room temperature. Cold before ripeness stalls the aroma.
2. Once cut, refrigerate and cover. Melon absorbs other smells enthusiastically and gives off its own equally enthusiastically.
3. Wash the outside before cutting. The rind sits on soil, and the knife carries whatever is on the skin straight into the flesh.
4. Cut in half through the stem end and scoop the seeds out with a spoon.
5. Serve cool but not cold. Fridge-cold melon tastes of almost nothing; twenty minutes out makes a real difference.

Common questions