Baobab shows up in a lot of wellness marketing looking almost unrecognisable — a fine white powder in a sleek pouch, promising superfood status. It's worth pulling that apart, because the actual fruit tells a more interesting story than the powder does.
The baobab pod doesn't grow soft like most fruit. It dries naturally on the tree, and inside is a chalky, tangy pulp that's been eaten straight, dissolved in water, or ground into flour for generations across the continent it's native to. The "superfood powder" is just that pulp, milled fine and exported.
Nothing about baobab needed inventing. It needed exporting, and somewhere in that journey the context got left behind.
In the kitchen, I use it the way it's traditionally used: stirred into porridge, whisked into a tangy dressing, folded into a dessert where its natural citrus note does the work a lemon usually does. Myth aside, it's just a very good ingredient.