Food - Drink
Most Of The World's Apricots Come From This Country
By NATASHA BAILEY
If you want to make a tasty fruit dessert, but you're tired of the usual apples and peaches, you should give apricots a try. Food Network describes this fruit's flavor as peachy, but with a soft sour note, and they can be eaten both fresh and dried; what you may not know is that your apricots likely come from this one country.
While apricot trees are planted all over the world, Turkey is the world’s largest apricot producer; apricots need a warm climate to thrive, and Turkey has very suitable growing conditions. Most Turkish regions grow and sell fresh fruit, but the Malatya-Elazığ-Erzincan region produces 85 to 90% of the world's dried apricots.
Interestingly, Turkish apricots are dried whole, while apricots grown in California are dried after being cut in half; this distinction makes Turkish dried apricots plumper, more moist, and less tart. Apricots are more successfully grown in the East than in the West, but people around the world love eating and cooking with this vitamin-rich fruit.