Does the deep-fried feijoa dessert live up to the hype?

Feijoa expert Kate Evans believes she may have found the greatest New Zealand dessert.

Costing a whopping $25 at Metro’s 2024 restaurant of the year Forest in Auckland, the dessert has the fruit fried whole like a donut and rolled in sherbet made from its skins, with sticky ginger cake and Earl Grey custard.

Evans describes herself as "New Zealand’s reigning feijoa queen (slash nerd) and author of the only recent book about feijoas", (aptly named Feijoa). So who better to review the dish?

"People have been telling me about this for three years. They keep being like 'have you tried Forest's deep-fried feijoa?'" Evans tells Nights.

"And I keep not being in Auckland at the right time or being busy because I live in Raglan. So this year I was determined to come up for it."

In her review for The Spinoff, she writes it arrived in shades of beige; "a pale speckled blob on a lava-mountain the colour of a cup of tea with milk."

It's essentially layers of Kiwi nostalgia that's reminiscent of dairy donuts, Earl Grey, sherbet and the pineapple fritter, she says.

"On top is this deep-fried feijoa but it's coated in this kind of white powder …

"So what she does, the chef Plabita Florence, she dehydrates the peel, so she doesn't waste anything and then the peel is where quite a lot of the flavour and the sort of tanginess is and so then she grinds it up really fine and then mixes it with sugar and citric acid and then rolls the deep-fried feijoa in the sherbet.

"It's amazing because you kind of still get that tang and then it sort of pops in your mouth a little bit in that sherbet-y way. Then it's got this very satisfying like deep-fried crunch to it. Then you bite into the middle – you're not going to like this if you don't particularly like feijoas but – it's kind of like a jam-y feijoa centre, so mushy. And that is not all.

"The deep-fried feijoa is sitting on a ginger cake. It is then covered in Earl Grey custard and I have never had an Earl Grey custard before, but it was so delicious."

She says she didn't find it odd because she's travelled the world and seen the different ways people eat feijoa and include it in their cooking.

"It's quite different from the home backyard

fruit and the apple and feijoa crumble version to the fancy restaurant version but I kind of like that.

"New Zealand chef's do that kind of thing all the time … [they take] things that are very homely and broad to a lot of people and then they make a fancy version."