It's not because I've neglected FSV, on the contrary, I'm quite active on Facebook and Instagram, and if you don't follow both, now you know they are there!
I had a very shitty year. Not so much vegan related, but a bad living situation, a disappointment from someone I thought was a friend, and a hectic time finding a regular job.
Now I'm settled and feeling normalized and adventurous in my vegan cooking again.
So I did what anyone would do, when my local grocery had fresh jackfruit for sale, I bought one just for the adventure of cutting one open.
The fruit was 79¢ a pound and that totaled a bit over $12 for me. I thought that was a lot, but since I figured I would get a lot of meat from the fruit, I did it. And adventure. I'm all about adventure.
I've had non-brined jackfruit before and it's particularly sweet. Kinda like if pineapple and a banana had a fruit baby. That's the flavor. The texture is something else, but we'll get to that later in the post.
When I got the fruit home it totally smelled like bubble gum. I read online that jackfruit have a very sweet smell. After a while, when I couldn't make the time to cut it, I put it on my balcony, as the sweet smell became a it overpowering for me.
Then on Saturday I took the time, got some plastic gloves, some oil, and cut open the fruit.
There are many tutorials online on how to cut this stuff, but I'm going to go over what I found interesting about the process.
With jackfruit, there is no particular designated meat. I mean, the yellow part is the part you eat, but the white part (I have no idea as to the names of the anatomy of jackfruit) is fused to the meat like a layered onion skin, so you have peel that off. On some of the tutorials I read, you eat it (the seeds too) but I didn't bother.
The thing is, the meat of the fruit is the casing for the seed. A big ass seed, a 'is this worth the effort' seed. And THAT SEED had a skin that you have to rip from the fruit! The good thing about the seeds is that they are very easy to cut, so you don't have to worry about your knife. Once you pull out the pod, you peel off the white part, open the meat, take out the seed, and rip off the seed skin that remains.
After all that, from this roughly 15 pound fruit, over an hour of work, and quite the clean up if you are not careful, you get about two pounds of actual eatable fruit.
Fresh jackfruit is a very tough chewy texture, almost like fruit jerky. Combine that with the banana/pineapple flavor, and it is a very unique experience.
I'm a vegan who does not think jackfruit tastes like pulled port (and most of that is the white part of the jackfruit, BTW) so I didn't get it for that (I hear you can roast and eat the seeds too). I plan on using this as a puree for ice cream or some other cake. Right now some is in the fridge and some is frozen for later.
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| The fruit is the bottom center. |
Am I glad I did this? Yeah.
Would I buy this again? Probably not. It's too much work. You must wear gloves so your hands don't get all sticky, and it's a lot of clean up.
Who knows, a few months from now I might have a change of heart and go for it again. But for now, I gotta find a use for all this sweet, sweet fruit.
Keep bein' vegan.
