Hello
And this is a small one. And I got this at my Asian supermarket. If you live here in the United States, most Asian supermarkets will probably carry these. You may or may not be able to find one at your normal or local supermarket. Just depends. But the jackfruit is not that common or not. A lot of people, at least here in the United States, really know about it.
But it is the largest tree fruit and it is native to parts of India and Malaysia, but it’s cultivated and grown all over the world, particularly in lowland tropical areas. So there’s a lot of countries that grow this. It also grows in like Florida here in the United States. It is just kind of amazing fruit.
I’m excited to dive into this and show you how to eat it and do a taste test for you. So when picking one when I got this, it was really green and really hard and I knew it wasn’t ripe yet typically with fruits, especially tropical fruits that are going to be shipped a long ways, they will pick them when they’re not ripe and then you have to let them
I mean, with with fruit, it’s always best to let it ripen, let it ripen as much as possible in the tree and then pick it off. But there are fruits like this one that you can just ripen on the counter. And so this is not really super bright green anymore. It’s more of a yellowish green and there’s these brown spots on it.
And also, if you push on it, there’s give to the skin. It could probably even go a couple more days on the counter. But I’m going to dive into it right now. And also, it’s been dripping out juice from the STEM area. I’m doing pools on my counter, so I’m just going to go ahead and dive into it right now.
An interesting thing about jackfruit also is a lot of vegetarians or vegans will use it as a meat substitute. And so you can add a little bit of barbecue sauce to it and almost be like a fake pulled pork sandwich, which is really, really cool. Before I dive into this and cut into it, I want to talk about some nutritional benefits.
It is loaded with nutrition. It is high in vitamin A, vitamin C, riboflavin, magnesium and potassium. They are more moderate as far as calories go per serving moderately high in calories. And they’re very high in fiber for the servings and they are high in antioxidants. These can be eaten either raw or you can cook them.
And the seeds that are on the inside are also edible. But you need to cook them first. They’re usually either boiled or roasted and then you can eat the the seeds. Pretty awesome. So let’s go ahead and cut into this. And you need a sharp knife. It is going to be a little sticky. So some people will oil their hands and the knife just makes a little bit easier.
And so I have a little bit of oil here. I’m just going to put some on my hands and on the knife a little bit. Just be careful if you’re oiling the knife and then I’m just going to go in here and cut into this. And we will kind of go around it, it’s definitely a lot easier doing this standing up, but for the article, I need to be sitting down once my kitchen is finished, I’ll be standing up all the time in the kitchen that any of you have tried to open up one of these.
You know what is what? I mean, it’s a little bit difficult to get into if you have a nice sharp knife, Pam should be fine. And this is like the sticky, sappy substance that gets on your knife as well. And so that’s why the oil on the blade really helps. Time to switch over to a different knife. That.
That’s really what needs to be sharpened. So definitely a lot easier with this knife. And there we go, that’s what it looks like on the inside. Crazy, huh, pretty awesome. And there’s these seeds right there that you want to just take those out and you can save them if you want to cook them.
And there’s these. This is the thick hard. STEM that grows through the fruit and you don’t eat that, you need to cut that out, what you eat is around the seeds and if you cut into it and it’s not as ripe as you would like, you can just wrap it in plastic wrap and just leave it on your counter and it’ll ripen a little bit more.
So we could cut this in half again like this and. So I can cut it again in half. Like this. And then you can ease more easily, get that stem throughout the middle. OK, and again, like I mentioned, if it doesn’t look quite right to you, then she kind of be like a darker orange color. This is still not quite completely ripe.
And so I’m going to wrap it and just let it ripen a little bit more on the counter. Also, they sell canned jack fruit, and so a lot of supermarkets will actually carry the canned jack fruit and so you can buy that as well. Sometimes it’s it’s a canyon in water or in a syrup. So if you can’t find it fresh and you want to try it, that is a good option as well.
So it does take a lot of time to break this down, see, so the fruit that you eat is the stuff that surrounds the seed right there. And see that and a lot of the stuff around at this White House that it’s just you don’t really eat that. So if you open it up, you can it’s a little bit easier like this and you can pull the pods out.
And usually there’s a little pod here that comes out that’s not quite the same texture as everything else. And that is the fruit that’s right here. So you kind of peel away all that and then you’re left with this, which is the main free pod. And then you want to get that scene out of there.
So this is the edible fruit. This is the edible seed that needs to be boiled or roasted. And you should be able to see a color difference between the pod and the stuff, the stringy stuff that’s around the pod that you don’t eat. OK, so that’s the nice little fruit pod right there, and I would just kind of use your finger now to get in there and open up a little hole and you can poke out that seed.
And then save the fruit, so I’m going to do half of this now and I’m going to save the other half and let it ripen a little bit longer. There’s not really only one correct way on how to eat or open up a jackfruit and eat it, but the general idea is you want to open it up and you want to get out the little pods again.
This is the little pod surrounded by a greener yellowish green kind of sinew type of stringy deal. And actual pod is more of an orange orangish color and there will be a seed in there. The seed is already out and that is the fruit that you eat. So that’s however you want to get to the pod is totally up to you.
I mean, there’s only a couple of ways you can cut it, cut it open to begin with. Just make sure to cut it lengthwise is a little easier and then you can do it in quarters or eighths, quarter it and then just make a smaller, more manageable pieces to work with if you want. Right here. This is a nice full pod.
And then this extra stuff that you don’t use, you could throw it in the compost if you want. And I just wanted to point out, I should have pointed out this earlier is this one is not very ripe when you even though it’s there’s some give on the side, it should be softer on the outside of the fruit.
It should be softer. There is give, but it’s still not ripe like this whole interior here should be a brighter or like a darker yellow color as opposed to more of a pale ish yellow. So this probably could have gone to maybe three more days on the counter. That’s OK. I’m going to wrap this up in plastic wrap and then I will just let this continue to ripen and all the fruit on the inside underneath here is going to ripen a lot more fully.
And so in a couple more days, I will tackle that fruit. And here is all the scraps. From that first half at the latest graphs, and you can compost that. If you want, here are the seeds that you can cook. And here is the fruit, almost not quite there, a little bit darker, some of these are more riper than others, like this one right here is a lot more right than some of the other pieces in here.
And we do taste with this one. Hmm. It’s still really good, even though it’s not quite completely ripe, it tastes like. To me, it tastes like a mix between classic bubblegum pineapple and like juicy fruit. Gum, classic bubble gum, juicy fruit, gum, pineapple and Starburst. It’s kind of a good explanation on how it tastes.
It’s a very easy to eat. So bubble gum, classic flavor, bubble gum, juicy fruit, bubble gum, pineapple and starburst mix that together. That’s kind of the flavor to me anyways. And because it’s not quite completely ripe, it’s more a little crunchy, but it’s still fairly sweet. So if you actually don’t want your fruit to be as sweet, then you may like prefer it better this way.
But I’m going to show you what it looks like a couple more days after ripen, the other half ripens a little bit more. Oh, right. I am back. And I let that jackfruit half. Ripen longer. And what I did is I put it in this plastic bag. After I wrapped it in the plastic wrap. And on the inside, I put a banana and the banana hopes to ripen better, and it’s very, very, very fruity smelling and it’s much softer now.
And I want to point out something as well. If you want to try jackfruit and you don’t want to try, that can jackfruit, but you don’t want to deal with this big, huge fruit, because if you don’t like it , then you’re probably going to waste a lot of it. They have pieces that they sell that are like in chunks, like maybe even a fourth of one of these or maybe like take this half and divide it into thirds and they’ll have that shrink wrapped or wrapped with plastic and they’ll sell it
just like that. So you can try it without a big investment, if that makes sense. And most of the time they will sell those right next to the large ones. And so I’m going to take this off and look at it. It’s definitely much more brown. It’s almost to the point where it’s getting to getting to brown and on the bottom, there’s a little bit of mold starting to grow on the bottom.
So I might have waited waited too long, but I’m going to cut into this. Yeah, so the top part looks a little gross, but on the inside, it’s definitely not as bad. S. . And. They can be much more yellow and orange on the inside, and it just depends on the jack that you get because this one is definitely pretty right now and squishy.
So I’m just going to open it up and get these notepads. Out. See, there is the part again and definitely has a better color to it than previous. But some people, if you’re going to cook these jackfruit, then you can just use the green one and not worry about it. But if you’re going to eat it. If you want to eat it fresh without cooking it, then.
It’s going to taste better when it’s more right. So this one is definitely more right. Give us a taste. See that nice orange color there? Mm hmm. Another cool thing about buying it in chunks or pieces that are individually wrapped is you can tell how ripe it is by looking at it and so you can pick out one that might be more ripe, depending on how you want to use it.
Just eat it raw. Or if you’re going to cook it, then you may not worry about it and just get one of the four ones. So there you go. That is the jackfruit, the largest fruit in the world that grows on trees. Hopefully you enjoyed this article.
I’m Matt Taylor. There’s been another episode of In the Kitchen with Matt. Thank you for joining me as always. Thumbs up down the corner. Push it. Don’t forget to and check out my other articles, Tator.