It's been a long while since I've been able to take a vacation and venture outside of NYC. Now five months into our quarantine reality, I find myself daydreaming about faraway cities with exciting sights, sounds, and smells. Most of all, I daydream about all the food abroad: street snacks, supermarket specialties, and local, seasonal produce.
In an attempt to bring a little bite of imaginary travel right into my apartment, I finally took it upon myself to explore my local grocer to find something novel to try. Twenty minutes later, 2 humongous slices of tropical jackfruit ended up on my kitchen counter.
What is jackfruit?
A fascinating "multiple fruit," a single jackfruit is actually composed of hundreds (or thousands!) of mature flowers, each of which are edible. Native to and most commonly used in South and Southeast Asia, it can be eaten raw when it's ripe or cooked when it's unripe. (If intending to use as a meat substitute, it's best to use the fleshy fruit arils of an unripe jackfruit!) It's got a excitingly spiky exterior and can grow to be as big as a toddler and weigh up to 120 pounds. Its rind has a whiff of a light, durian-like smell, but is not nearly as pungent. Inside, there are three components to the fruit that are all edible, each having a very different flavor and texture—making it one of the most interesting raw ingredients I've ever met.
Ingredient #1: The sweet, ripe fruit
Ripe jackfruit flesh—the arils of the fruit—is delicious. It's sweet but not saccharine, and tastes like pineapple, cantaloupe, banana, papaya, and cucumber had a baby. It has a tender but juicy-crisp bite. It's simply addictive: I ate four pounds of it in one day. (I have no regrets.)
You can tear it up into slivers and add it to a salad, or toss it with a spicy vinaigrette for a bit of a mango con chile y limon vibe. You can chop it up, candy it, and add it to an ice cream sundae or granola. Or, you can just eat it plain like I did—because it's already perfect on its own.
Ingredient #2: The starchy, bean-like seed
If you love potatoes, beans, and starchy veggies, you are going to LOVE the jackfruit seed. Shaped like a plump fava bean with the coloration of a pinto bean, it tastes like a combination of lotus, chestnut, and potato.
Boil it or roast it until it's tender, then treat it the same way you would any of those aforementioned ingredients. It's super mild in taste, and its texture is a good blend of creamy and mealy. Just be sure you peel away the plasticky skin that covers the creamy, meal goodness before eating it! I'm already dreaming about the day I get to make jackfruit seed hummus, curry, chili, or chips.
I yielded only about two handfuls of seeds from a 5-pound chunk of jackfruit, but if you bought a whole jackfruit, there can be anywhere from 100 to 500 seeds (one per aril)!
Ingredient #3: The chewy, silky-white tendrils
Often referred to the "rags" of the fruit, these fibrous strands of perianth that surround the sweet, fruity arils are relatively flavorless. They have a very rubbery texture: bouncy and al dente, reminiscent of latex.
This being my first time ever cooking with jackfruit, I truly had no clue what I was getting into. I decided on the spot to make some sweet and spicy gochujang jackfruit tacos as well as some jackfruit and broccoli stir-fry.
For the tacos, I'd hoped that by using some pork bone broth and lard, I could turn the rags into a pork substitute. In the end, it was nicely spiced and soaked up a lot of flavor, but couldn't pass convincingly as shredded pork. It was definitely stringy, but not in a totally pleasant way. The fibrous nature of the rags didn't quite disappear even with an hour of simmering away on the stove. A few takeaways here: dice the rags into smaller pieces for an easier time when it comes to chewing, and consider pressure-cooking it before using in recipes for more tenderness.
For the stir-fry, I adapted my own recipe for beef and broccoli by replacing the beef with chopped jackfruit rags. This one turned out much more palatable to me, mainly because its vegetal, tropical-fruitiness melded especially well with the ginger-soy-hoisin combo. I found this application also had a better texture—maybe because the rags were coated in cornstarch and pan-seared beforehand, each bite had a little bit of carryover crunch from that shallow fry. Main takeaway here: consider deep-frying your jackfruit rags after a light dip in cornstarch, using a similar technique to Korean fried chicken—I think they might make the perfect crunchy snacks!
Bonus potential ingredient?
The core of the jackfruit: I'm actually still unsure if this part of the fruit is edible. When cutting into the fruit, your hands, knife, and cutting board will get coated with a very sticky resin that is extremely hard to wash off. Most explainers I found instructed cooks to cover their surfaces and hands with coconut oil to avoid a particularly troublesome clean-up process. (Afraid of the hazardous potential of a too-slippery grip while handling a knife, I opted for disposable gloves instead.)
Most of this sticky secretion escapes when cutting into the core, which is why I was hesitant when it came to cooking with it—if it's already so impossibly sticky on my hands, what would it do to my digestive system? While I did find sources that say "the core is perfectly edible," I decided to play it safe and skip it on my first go-around.
If you too are feeling trapped in a monotonous rhythm and need a change of scenery, I highly recommend taking a mini-vacay by switching it up in the kitchen. Be open to all the things you've never cooked with or eaten before, and allow yourself some time and space to just experiment. Have fun! Make mistakes! Failure is encouraged!
Most importantly of all, treat yourself with a break from the routine. And definitely invite me over if you're having a jackfruit party.
