Sharks Fin Melon Advice

shark fin melon soup I think. And saved the seed.

Thanks Jeanied. I'll defo save some seed. Does anyone have a recipe for the soup?

Haven't a clue about how to cook/use - but sure there must be some recipes 'somewhere' on the net......but PLEASE ! save ALL the seed - I, for one, would love to do a deal with you on the seed swap!

Found a recipe on bits-of-taste.blogspot.com (googled it) . For chinese Shaoxing wine you can substitute dry sherry.

Quark1 consider it done.

Its supposed to taste similar, and be a cheaper version to the real sharks fin (Chinese delicacy?) that they hack off and throw the live carcass back!

I suppose there's two ways of looking at it...........if you're eating the melon you're saving a shark and................do I really want to savour a sharks fin? Errrrr........ NO!

Watch Grow Your Own - the Chinese dude in it grows Shark Fin Melon, and makes a soup at the end. Great film even if you don't get the recipe.

It's called Shark's Fin Melon because of the texture - the flesh separates into clear strands (perhaps like spaghetti squash?) resembling shark's fin. It doesn't taste like shark's fin - the threads are more gelatinous. Shark's fin is a delicacy as it's expensive. (Had it in a soup at our Chinese Wedding Banquet.)

*By the way, the plant is a bit of a rampant rambler - my mum has been growing them every year for the past 8 or so years.

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*By the way, the plant is a bit of a rampant rambler - my mum has been growing them every year for the past 8 or so years.[/QUOTE]

Thats a lot of soup or does she have another recipe for them.

I'm trying out a soup recipe tomorrow . I'll let you know the verdict.

Just tried the soup made to a recipe that include prawns and crabsticks. It was ok, but
considering the amount of work trying to a) get into the melon and b) trying to remove all the seeds, I'm not sure it was worth it.

shark's fin melon uses

To get into the 'melon' use a saw - much easier and safer than a knife. Removing the seeds is not really THAT difficult. But some recipes call for cooking it first then cooling and then removing the seeds and skin. For the soup - the key is a really good-tasting stock. Make one that you would eat on it's own without and additions. There are lots of recipes for Chinese soup stock out there... Then parboil pieces of the melon in the stock, and remove and cool. Then remove the skin, seeds, and anything else not shark's-fin like. Return the melon back to the soup and continue cooking. It will be worth the effort if properly done.

This melon has many other names - Chilacayote being the one most often used in the world - and indicating it's origin in Latin America. It's species is Cucurbita ficifolia.

It can also be used young like summer squash (marrows).

The other common use is to make candy and sweets. These are popular in Latin America and I'm told France (more here as a confit). It's called angel hair. I believe to make this candy you boil the flesh slowly in sugar syrup till it reaches a soft ball stage (when the syrup put in cold water forms a soft ball) or a little past this, then removed and allowed to dry. It's said to be a bit bland - so I think I would add some vanilla (at the end of cooking), and maybe a little lemon juice (at the start of cooking) to make it a bit more appealing. It's called pie melon in Australia... though I think it being confused with citron melon - a type of watermelon.

This may be close to the thing sold in sweet pasties in Spain as "Cabell d'angel". It's very popular, but I found it distinctly insipid. Tastes ofnothing but sugar, and about as fibrous as candied Angelica. I thought that was made from the weird little round melons they sell which are quite inedible uncooked (so not what you expect from a melon!!)

I know this as a sharkfin marrow, got seeds from a friend who brought them back from a visit to her home in China. I grew it on in a 6x4 greenhouse until another Chinese friend saw it and said it wouldn't fit in when it was fully grown, so then I planted it in a pot, growing up a drainpipe! I had just 4 fruits from it, but my friend's grew along the fence for nearly 30 feet and had 17 fruits on. This is a pic of one of them and one of the plant.