Guava Juice

Guava, Psidium guajava, is a post-contact fruit in Hawaiʻi. It is a plant of tropical America that arrived in the nineteenth century and then ran wild through the lowland pastures and gulches, so that the fruit became a common thing to gather and press. Its juice belongs to the plantation-era and local table rather than to the Native Hawaiian table of the canoe plants. It is pressed at home, sold as nectar, and carried into the blended juice of passion fruit, orange and guava that the islands call POG, in which the guava supplies the aromatic body. Provenance research — The Pacific Migration Trail names POG as a blend first made on Maui in 1971, and the three fruits as three continents in one glass: passion fruit from South America, orange from Asia and guava from Central America.

Guava juice is the strained pulp of ripe Psidium guajava, smooth and slightly thick, with a tart-sweet taste and a pronounced perfume. It is pink to pale orange in colour, depending on the flesh of the fruit. Pressed fruit is sieved to remove the hard seeds and often thinned with water and sweetened lightly, which is why the bottled form is usually called nectar and the pure pressed form juice. Served cold, it is drunk alone or as the third part of POG, where it sits beside Passiflora edulis for tartness and Citrus sinensis for sweetness. The same pulp is the base of the guava syrups used on shave ice and of the guava jellies and chiffon fillings of the local bakery.

Guava juice is drunk cold at breakfast, with the plate lunch, and as a counterweight to fried and salted food, since its acid and sweetness cut through the richness of the meal. It shares the glass with passion fruit and orange in POG, where its aroma is what binds the sharper two fruits together. As a syrup it sits on shave ice beside lilikoʻi and li hing mui. It is not drunk with raw fish, where its perfume would crowd the fish.