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Article about best dates to eat:
I Grew up Eating Dates Every Day—Here’s the Best Way to Cook With Them. Dates vary from soft and fudgy to firm and chewy, and each type has its best use. Here's how to pick, cook with, and store the most available varieties.
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Two dates and a cup of coffee—it's a ritual I've carried for as long as I can remember. I grew up in Jordan, where even the pavements were lined with date palms, their heavy clusters dangling like lanterns. The palms' sharp spikes snagged and tore more than a few of my favorite sweaters, yet I loved them anyway. Across the Arab world, dates are stitched into daily life: a small dessert after dinner, a midday snack to keep you going, or a sweet you serve to guests with post-dinner coffee and tea. They're also given as gifts, packed in boxes embossed with golden arabesque motifs. The dates are arranged in beautiful rows—sometimes stuffed with walnuts, pistachios, and almonds, dipped in chocolate, or dusted with shredded coconut or crushed pistachios. The pistachios' bright green and the coconut's soft white contrast with the deep brown fruit. During Ramadan, a single date with a glass of water is the first thing to break the fast at sunset, an early Islamic practice that has endured for centuries as a simple, restorative ritual after long hours without food. During Eid, Christmas, and Easter, dates show up in ma'amoul—crumbly semolina cookies often stuffed with spiced date paste and dusted with powdered sugar. In Tunisia, dates are found in makrout—golden, diamond-shaped pastries with a chewy semolina crust, filled with dates and finished with a honey glaze. In Sudan, a date or two is sometimes added to subtly sweeten a batch of ful—stewed fava beans served with bread. Dates aren't just a staple in kitchens across the Arab world. In the US, consumption is steadily growing as more people turn to them as a natural sweetener and nutritious snack, according to Cognitive Market Research's 2025 Date Fruit Market Report. Whether you're blending them into a smoothie, baking them into bread, or snacking straight from the box, they deserve a permanent spot in your pantry. Below, I'll walk you through their history in the US, the types you're most likely to encounter, and the best ways to store and enjoy them. A Tour of Dates in the US. For thousands of years, date palms have thrived in the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa, with evidence of farming as far back as 7000 BCE in Mesopotamia. Their fruit fueled travelers, fed communities, and became an integral part of rituals and celebrations. At the turn of the 20th century, the United States developed its own fascination with the date palm. According to NPR's 2014 Morning Edition report Forbidding Fruit: How America Got Turned On to the Date," between 1900 and 1930, Americans were captivated by the imagery of the Middle East—from One Thousand and One Nights to tales of Aladdin and Sinbad—and growers in California's Coachella Valley leaned into this fascination to market this new crop. Botanists from the USDA's Agricultural Explorer program traveled to Iraq, Morocco, and Algeria to bring back offshoots of date palms, each weighing up to 60 pounds, since planting seeds wouldn't guarantee edible fruit. They quickly realized that the blazing sun and cool desert nights of California's Coachella Valley—and parts of Arizona's Sonoran Desert—mirrored the trees' native climate. Those imported palms flourished, and the desert soon became the heart of American date production. According to the same NPR report, by the late 1940s, growers had doubled down on the fantasy by launching the International Festival of the Dates in Indio, the desert town at the center of California's date industry. For the duration, the whole community was encouraged to dress the part: There were movie ushers in harem pants, waitresses in bolero jackets, even grocery clerks in genie costumes—not sure how I feel about that. Exoticism and Orientalist stereotypes aside, there's no denying dates were quickly embraced and became part of American food culture. California historian Sarah Seekatz told NPR in 2014 that Coachella Valley's date boom was one of the "most romantic" chapters in America's experiments with what people in the country considered exotic fruit. Of course, no dive into the US history of dates would be complete without an honorable mention of the date shake. Palm Springs' unofficial signature drink was born in the Coachella Valley in the 1920s. Just vanilla ice cream, cold milk, and dates, blended smooth—frosty, creamy, and caramel-sweet. Nearly a century on, you can still find it at date shops and roadside cafés across the desert. Types of Dates and How to Use Them.