A pitch for picking up guavas at the market

Contrary to popular opinion, Garcia says, guavas with pink flesh are not always the most flavorful. Guavas with orange flesh taste tangy, like pineapples, and white-fleshed guavas are creamy, less fragrant than their pink-fleshed cousins. The larger the guava, the more meat you will find inside. “Don’t scoop the seeds out because the sweetest part is in the middle. Swallow the seeds.”

The Garcia orchard is perched atop a mountain, where the trees benefit from Southern California’s warm temps and ocean breezes. In a normal year, the trees produce fruit from August to January. “You can eat a guava when it is as hard as a rock, but some people prefer them soft like pudding,” she says.

If you prefer to drink your guava instead of eating it in the raw, Birch mixologist Gabriela Mlynarczyk has a recipe she recommends to make arefreshing guavatini. “It goes down like water, it’s so tasty,” she says. “Because the guavas are so fragrant and really potent, you get huge amounts of flavors from them. They’re just completely intoxicating.”