PRODUCE PICKS An apricot as sweet as candy
From Central Asia’s Silk Road to the orchards of Modesto? It took more than three decades for John Driver to develop one of the most unusual— and certainly the sweetest— apricot grown today. The CandyCot is so unique and so special, the fruit was DNA “fingerprinted” at UC Davis. Here’s the back story:
Driver is a plant biologist by education and a farmer by trade, but he’s known as the Indiana Jones of apricots. He spent more than 30 years traveling the world in search of the sweetest apricots on Earth. He found them in the Fergana Valley, which stretches through the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, where apricots most likely originated — and where Driver sampled apricots from thousands of friendly residents’ backyards. If the flavor impressed him, Driver brought the pits back to the United States — 1,500 in all, representing 30 different families of apricots. The Fergana Valley is very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter, which made crossing breeds tricky, if the apricots were to thrive in California’s more Mediterranean climate.
Today, Driver grows more than 100 acres of these special apricots, which are given Russian names. His first two successful varieties are the Yuliya and the Anya, but they are marketed as CandyCots. You should find them retailing for about $ 4.99 per pound at some Whole Foods markets and online at www. candycot. com.
How sweet are these CandyCots? I tested the juice with a refractometer and found that even the greener fruit tested above 25 percent sugar; most clocked in above the 30 percent mark. By contrast, a really sweet cantaloupe carries about 17 percent sugar and a Thompson seedless grape has about 20 percent.
Driver says he has more varieties well under way and still others that, he says, will keep his kids and grandkids busy developing apricots for the next 30 years.