Updated September 3, 2026. Originally published November 2021.
Chontaduro is the orange, starchy fruit of the peach palm — a staple across the Amazon basin and one of the most recognisable street snacks in Colombia. It looks like a small mango and eats like a dense, savoury sweet potato, which surprises most people the first time.
It also cannot be eaten raw, and that is where most first attempts go wrong. Below: what it tastes like, how to boil it properly, how Colombians actually serve it, and where to buy it in the US.
Chontaduro at a Glance
| What it is | The starchy orange fruit of the peach palm, Bactris gasipaes — a staple across the Amazon basin for over two thousand years |
| Also called | Pupunha (Brazil) · pejibaye (Costa Rica) · chonta (Ecuador) · pijuayo (Peru) · pewa (Trinidad) · peach palm (English) |
| How to say it | chon-ta-DOO-ro |
| Tastes like | Dense, dry and nutty — somewhere between a roasted chestnut, a boiled sweet potato and a waxy new potato. Savoury, not sweet. |
| Can you eat it raw? | No. Raw chontaduro is rock-hard and an irritant. It must be boiled before eating — this is not a preference, it is the whole preparation. |
| Cooking time | 45 minutes to 3 hours in heavily salted water, depending on size and ripeness |
| How it is eaten | Split, seed removed, drizzled with honey and a pinch of salt — the Cali street-cart standard |
| In season | Two harvests in Colombia, roughly January–April and September–December |
| Buying it in the US | Fresh is very hard to find outside a few Latin markets. Jarred in brine is how most people get it. |
What Is Chontaduro?
Chontaduro is a fruit that grows in the Amazonian areas of South America. The fruit, also called peach palm, grows on palm trees in tropical regions like Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru.
Peach palm is native to South America and is now grown in Central America and parts of tropical Asia as well, though outside the tropics it is rarely sold fresh.
The palm trees that breed chontaduro can reach up to 6 to 24 metres (20 to 80 feet) tall and live for as long as 75 years.
You’ll recognize the trees from their long palm fronds, with bunches of vibrant orange fruits hanging at the top of the plant.
What Chontaduro Is Called Across Latin America
One fruit, a different name in almost every country that grows it — which is why people so often think they are looking at two different things. Bactris gasipaes is the botanical name; everything below is the same fruit.
| Name | Where it is used | Worth knowing |
| Chontaduro | Colombia, especially the Pacific coast and Cali | The name most people search. Cali sells it from street carts by the bagful. |
| Pupunha | Brazil | In Brazil the fruit is boiled and eaten with coffee at breakfast. The palm is also grown there for palmito. |
| Pejibaye | Costa Rica | Sold cooked at roadside stands, usually halved and served with a spoonful of mayonnaise — the Costa Rican habit that surprises everyone else. |
| Chonta / chontaduro | Ecuador | Also called chonta dura. Eaten much as in Colombia. |
| Pijuayo | Peru | Amazonian Peru, around Iquitos and the Ucayali. |
| Pewa | Trinidad and Tobago | Boiled and sold in bags at the roadside, salted. |
| Peach palm | English | A translation of the fruit’s appearance, not its flavour. It tastes nothing like a peach — expect chestnut and sweet potato. |
If you have eaten pupunha in São Paulo and chontaduro in Cali and thought they were different fruits, they were not. The differences you noticed were down to variety, ripeness and what was served alongside.
How to Cook Chontaduro
This is the part that matters most, and the part most write-ups skip. Chontaduro cannot be eaten raw. Uncooked it is rock-hard and an irritant to the mouth and throat. Boiling is not a serving suggestion — it is what makes the fruit edible at all.
The method
- Rinse and leave whole. Do not peel first. The skin protects the flesh while it cooks and slips off easily afterwards.
- Cover with heavily salted water. Far more salt than feels right — roughly 2 tablespoons per litre. The fruit is starchy and bland on its own and takes salt only during boiling.
- Boil 45 minutes to 3 hours. Small, ripe fruit can be done in 45 minutes; large or firmer ones take considerably longer. A pressure cooker brings it down to about 25 minutes, which is what most Colombian households actually use.
- Test with a knife. It is ready when a blade slides in with no resistance, like a fully cooked potato. Underdone chontaduro is unpleasant and slightly numbing — if in doubt, keep boiling.
- Peel while warm. The skin comes away in strips with your fingers or a paring knife. Cold, it fights you.
- Halve and remove the seed. A single hard seed sits in the middle. Flick it out with your thumb and the fruit is ready.
Cooked chontaduro keeps in the refrigerator for about four days and freezes well once peeled and seeded.
How Colombians Actually Eat It
Walk through Cali and you will pass carts stacked with orange chontaduro under a glass lid, sold warm by the bag. The standard order is simple and worth copying exactly before you start improvising.
Honey and salt
Split the cooked fruit, take out the seed, drizzle honey into the hollow and add a pinch of salt. That is the whole thing. The honey plays against the starch the way it does with a sweet potato, and the salt is what stops it tasting flat. Skipping the salt is the most common mistake — it is doing more work than the honey is.
The other standard toppings
- Lime and salt — the savoury version, and the more common order among people who eat it daily.
- Hot sauce — a few drops of a vinegary Colombian ají, which cuts the density.
- Mayonnaise — standard in Costa Rica with pejibaye, and better than it sounds.
- Nothing at all — warm, salted from the cooking water, eaten out of hand.
Beyond the street version
Because cooked chontaduro behaves like a dense sweet potato, it slots into anything that would take one: mashed as a side, cubed into soups and stews near the end of cooking, blended with milk into a thick colada — the point where it crosses into Colombian dessert territory — or roasted alongside meat. It sits comfortably next to the rest of Colombia’s best-known dishes on a table. Chontaduro flour, made from the dried fruit, is used in the Amazon for breads and porridges and works as a partial substitute for wheat flour in baking.
One thing it is not: chontaduro is the fruit of the peach palm, while hearts of palm come from the stem of the same tree. Harvesting the heart kills the palm before it can fruit, so a grower chooses one crop or the other. They are not interchangeable in a recipe.
Chontaduro Nutrition
Chontaduro is unusual among tropical fruits: it is starchy and genuinely fatty rather than sugary and watery, which is why it functions as a staple food in the Amazon rather than as a dessert. A cooked portion is filling in the way a potato is filling.
What it reliably provides:
- Provitamin A carotenoids — the source of the deep orange colour, and the nutrient chontaduro is genuinely notable for.
- Complex carbohydrates — the reason it has been a staple crop for millennia.
- Unsaturated fat — unusual in a fruit, and part of why it satisfies like a starch.
- Dietary fibre, plus useful amounts of vitamin C, calcium and iron.
It is worth being straightforward about the limits of that. Chontaduro is a nutritious staple food, not a medicine, and you will find claims online that it prevents serious disease or works as an aphrodisiac. No study has shown either of those things in people. Eat it because it is filling, distinctive and good — which is reason enough.
Where to Buy Chontaduro in the US
Fresh
Difficult, and seasonal when it happens at all. Fresh chontaduro turns up occasionally in Latin markets serving Colombian, Ecuadorian and Brazilian communities — Queens, Miami, northern New Jersey, parts of Houston and Los Angeles — usually already boiled and sold warm, because the shops know most customers will not commit to three hours at the stove. It is not a supermarket item and you should not expect to order it fresh online; it does not travel well.
Jarred in brine — how most people actually get it
The practical route outside Latin America is chontaduro already cooked and packed in brine. It is peeled, seeded and ready to eat straight from the jar, so it skips the long boil entirely. The texture is slightly softer than freshly cooked and the salt is already in it, which means you may want less or none on top. La Fe Chontaduro Peach Palm Fruit in Brine is the version most widely stocked, imported from Colombia in 28 oz jars, and Mama Tere sells the same size for a few dollars less. Stock on both is erratic — this is a small import category and jars sell out for weeks at a time, so it is worth buying when you see it rather than when you need it.
Rinse it briefly if it tastes aggressively salty, warm it through, then treat it exactly like the fresh version: honey and salt, or lime and salt.
Frozen and flour
Some Latin markets carry frozen cooked chontaduro, which is closer to fresh in texture than the jarred version and worth taking if you see it. Chontaduro flour — dried fruit ground to a powder — is a specialist item, and you do not need it for anything above. It is worth knowing about if you bake: in Colombia it goes into arepas, pandebonos and porridge, and the plain ground version sold in the US has nothing added to it.
Chontaduro FAQ
What is chontaduro called in English?
Peach palm, or peach palm fruit. The name describes the colour and shape rather than the flavour — it tastes like chestnut and sweet potato, not peach. In Brazil it is pupunha, in Costa Rica pejibaye, in Ecuador chonta, in Peru pijuayo. All the same fruit, Bactris gasipaes.
What does chontaduro taste like?
Dense, dry and nutty — the closest comparisons are a roasted chestnut, a boiled sweet potato and a waxy new potato. It is savoury rather than sweet, which surprises people expecting fruit. The texture is floury and firm, never juicy.
Can you eat chontaduro raw?
No. Raw chontaduro is rock-hard and irritating to the mouth and throat. It has to be boiled in salted water — 45 minutes to 3 hours depending on size, or about 25 minutes in a pressure cooker — before it is edible. This is the one non-negotiable step.
Is chontaduro good for you?
It is a nutritious staple food: high in provitamin A carotenoids, complex carbohydrates, unsaturated fat and fibre, with useful vitamin C, calcium and iron. It is also calorie-dense and filling, closer to a potato than to an apple. Claims that it prevents serious illness or acts as an aphrodisiac are not supported by evidence.
How long does chontaduro take to cook?
45 minutes to 3 hours boiling in heavily salted water, depending on size and firmness. About 25 minutes in a pressure cooker. It is done when a knife slides in with no resistance.
Is chontaduro the same as hearts of palm?
No. Chontaduro is the fruit of the peach palm; hearts of palm are the stem core of the same tree. Harvesting the heart kills the palm before it fruits, so growers produce one or the other. They taste and behave nothing alike.
Conclusion
Chontaduro rewards a little patience. Boil it long enough in properly salted water and it turns into something dense and satisfying that has no real equivalent in North American cooking. Start with honey and salt, the way it is sold from the carts in Cali, then try lime, or ají, or mayonnaise, and see which one you keep going back to.
If you cannot find it fresh, jarred in brine is a genuine substitute and much easier to get hold of. Either way, cook it first.
Sources
- Growables: Peach Palm, Pejibaye – Bactris gasipaes
- Biodiversity And Conservation: Peach Palm (Bactris Gasipaes) in Tropical Latin America
- Biodiversity International: Peach Palm Bactris Gasipaes Kunth
- Eat Fresh: Heart of Palm
- City Tech: Chontaduro: Culinary Tourism Fall 2018
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Jorge Garcia is the founder of AmigoFoods, where he has spent over 20 years helping readers discover authentic Latin American and Spanish cuisine. Raised in a Cuban-American household, Jorge learned to cook at the hands of his mother and grandmother, carrying forward generations of family recipes. That heritage, backed by his family’s four-generation history in the Latin food industry, inspired him to launch AmigoFoods in 2003. With more than 1,000 published articles on recipes, ingredients, and food culture, Jorge’s mission is simple: make authentic Latin cooking approachable for home cooks everywhere while honoring the traditions behind every dish.