Reference point
Open a pod of ripe durian and smell as soon as it is pulled apart.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Harshly sweet, with notes of onion and boiled egg over a creamy, fatty base. It spreads far and hangs in the air for a very long time — further than jackfruit, because the sulphur compounds are lighter than the esters.
What makes durian differ from jackfruit is not sweetness but the sulphur compounds. They create the onion and egg notes, and they split humanity into two camps. Remove them and durian is just an ordinary sweet, fatty fruit.
It sits in the top stage because sulphur compounds are small and evaporate very fast — which is also why it carries so far.
How to smell it
Open a pod of perfectly ripe durian and smell at once from a hand’s span away. Wait ten minutes and smell again: some of the sulphur has gone and the creamy part comes through more clearly. Many people who hate durian in the first minute find it acceptable by the tenth.
Why this one is hard
Because of intensity and prejudice, which reinforce each other. The ten-minute exercise above is the most effective way to separate them.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Durian
Fermented family
Jackfruit is pure ester, so it is only sweet and winey; durian also has sulphur compounds, giving notes of onion and egg.
Scientific note
Durian contains both esters for the sweet part and volatile sulphur compounds for the onion and egg notes. The durian genome was sequenced in 2017. The results showed that the genes for making sulphur compounds had been duplicated many times during evolution. The tree has invested heavily in producing exactly what divides humanity.
In Vietnamese life
Durian is banned from many forms of public transport in Southeast Asia — one of very few cases where a smell has become the subject of regulation. Vietnam is now one of the largest exporters.