Mangos are for both eating as a fruit and used in cooking. Depending on the variety, they vary in size when full grown from as small as a couple inches to up a foot.

To eat them as fruit, you peel off the outside skin and then cut off slices of the fruit from the one large, flat, pumpkin seed shaped seed that goes from the top to the bottom of the fruit.

The green mango is basically unripe mango. Green mango can be sour or nutty and sweet depending on the variety. The sour ones are used in the place of lime or in combination with lime in Thai dishes.

An unripe mango is very hard when you touch it and does not give in like a ripe fruit. Depending on the variety, the unripened ones in Thailand are usually green, without yellow or red. However, the variety that are available here in the US are green, red and yellow in color. They are often ripe. When my recipe calls for green mango, I pick the hardest one I can find and use it right away and always keep it in the refrigerator.

In Thailand, there are more varieties and there are even some that are used exclusively when unripe. These varieties can be either very sour for cooking (e.g., geow) or are for eating and are a little sweet and floury and very crunchy (e.g., kiow sawoy).