To All,
On my trip to H Mart described in the last e-mail, I stumbled across the display of jack fruit. This is one impressive fruit. It is ovaloid (see picture) and the ones on display ranged from 20 to 50 pounds. The skin is densely covered with dull spikes about an eighth of an inch long (see picture); this is reminiscent of one of those rubber mats on the counter by the cashier at a restaurant that you put your payment on. Alternatively, you can think of the exterior as covered by a bed of nails, where the nails are short and dull. Due to size and the primordial look of the exterior, the jack fruit has the aura of a living fossil from the Carboniferous. I marveled at this fruit, but, not knowing anything about it, I hesitated to spend more than $20 on a blind buy after having been burned by the sour orange.
I went home and looked at what the Internet had to say about jack fruit. The first video I found showed someone cutting a jack fruit apart with a machete https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsafP-TDi_k This won my heart since it would give me a chance to use my machete, which has not gotten a whole lot of use since I brought it home from Panama in 1995. Other sites stressed the heavenly taste of this fruit. This made me wish that I had purchased it. Internet experts say that it is the biggest tree fruit in the world. (Is there some bigger non-tree fruit?) The fruit can reach more than a hundred pounds on a tree up to fifty feet tall. See the pictures of the jack fruit tree and of the jack fruit that weighs 61kg (134 pounds). Getting a fruit this big to market poses a problem (see picture).
As the days passed, I continued to feel the pull of the jack fruit, perhaps because it is the only fruit large enough to generate its own gravitational field. Finally, I decided to make the financial investment and buy a jack fruit. I did not want jack fruit to show up in the ones-that-got-away e-mail that is planned.
A week later I was back at H Mart. To make an investment like this, one wants to make sure that the fruit is ripe. The Internet said that it should give to the touch like an avocado and should be fragrant. The first picture below shows the jack fruit display and me smelling a candidate for purchase. After applying my two ripeness criteria, I was still unsure. Luckily, an Indian man saw my puzzlement and came to my rescue. He squeezed the one I had been leaning toward and pronounced it overripe. He picked out one that, he said, was a day or two from being perfect. I smelled it and could not smell anything, but his wife popped up, smelled it, and pronounced it fragrant. Apparently, like Mei-Mei, she is a super smeller. She said that the jack fruit was their national fruit. With the approval of these two experts, who apparently were attracted by someone showing interest in their national fruit, I picked up the jack fruit; see the picture that shows that even a weightlifter is disconcerted by the weight of a jack fruit. I hefted it into my shopping cart; see the picture that shows my jack fruit in captivity. I was especially pleased with this particular fruit because it was the smallest for sale; the biggest weighed more than twice as much. (Later in this shopping trip, this Indian man advised me on the purchase of lychee nuts, as you read in last week's e-mail. He was a good Samaritan who could tell that I needed someone to throw me a rope.) The conclusion: Fruit exploring, like any other exploring, goes a lot better if you have native guides.
At check out, I found that my jack fruit weighed 23.43 pounds. At $1.29/lb, this set me back $30.22. My receipt trumpeted the fact that the regular price was $1.99/lb and that I had saved $16.41. I preened myself on this saving.
Two days later it was time to butcher the jack fruit. The Internet experts freak out at the white, milky, dandelion-like sap, called latex, that oozes from a jack fruit incision; they say that this latex coats your knives and hands and is impervious to soap and water. Each expert has his own measures that he advocates to combat the latex menace. I decided to set up a card table in the back yard so that if the latex went all over the place, it would foul the back yard rather than my kitchen. I covered the table with the needed items:
- Newspaper to protect the card table from the latex.
- Machete, cleaver, carving knife, and steak knife for the various levels of cutting that are needed.
- Olive oil, which the experts say to slather on your hands and knives to keep the latex from adhering to them. The experts really are alarmist on this and try their best to scare you with the threat of latex.
- Paper towels for whatever general cleaning is needed.
- My back-up cutting board. I will use its back to protect it from the dreaded latex.
- A copy of Scientific American, which I have finished and am ready to throw away. The experts say that slick magazine paper is the best material for wiping latex off of your implements.
- Serving plate to pile the jack fruit on.
- Plastic bags to put jack fruit in so I can give it away or store it in my fridge.
- Two doubled trash bags on each side of the table. Jack fruit generates a lot of slash.
I took my machete and cut the jack fruit lengthwise. Then I cut it into halves, fourths, eighths, and sixteenths. A sixteenth was small enough to work with. (One picture shows a close-up of half a jack fruit. Another shows a half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth, with a fragment of the other sixteenth.) Now I faced the perennial problem of figuring out which part was good to eat and which should be thrown away, a problem that I nearly got wrong with the pomegranate. I decided that the yellow part was the good part, so I started separating it out. There were a mass of stringy fibers that held onto the yellow fruits, and it was somewhat tedious to dig out the fruits (see pictures). Each fruit was maybe an inch and a half long, three quarters of an inch wide, and a quarter of an inch deep. Each fruit held a seed. Keeping with the gestalt of this fruit, the seed was big, almost the size of a kumquat. The last picture shows the state of the card table when I had separated out five-sixteenths of the jack fruit; you can see some of the jack fruit piled on a plate and some in a plastic bag ready to be given away.
Periodically I would cut off another piece to clean. Cutting deep within the oozing insides of the jack fruit reminded me of the whale-butchering scenes in Moby Dick.
The big surprise is that my jack fruit showed so sign of latex at all. This apparently is unusual and indicates that this fruit was dead ripe. Hats off to my Indian advisors; they sure called this one right.
It took me about an hour and a quarter to separate out the yellow fruit from half of the jack fruit. After the first ten minutes, in which I learned how to do this, it was boring in the extreme. There are no pictures from the end of this process because the photographer got bored and left. I stopped after cleaning half the fruit and decided to give the remaining, uncleaned half to my neighbors. For a video of the Fruit Explorer cutting his jack fruit, see https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=eafd32a44851db10&id=EAFD32A44851DB10%21143&Bsrc=Share&Bpub=SDX.SkyDrive&authkey=%21AuQva1-Qbl_PTTA&v=3
I ate pieces while working. The jack fruit was sweet with a pleasing flavor that to me was not reminiscent of any other fruit, though others liken it to many fruits. (Wikipedia says it tastes like a combination of apple, pineapple, mango, and banana. Perhaps fruit flavors are like colors. Just as any color can be obtained by mixing a few primary colors, maybe any fruit flavor can be obtained by mixing a few primary fruit flavors.) My main impression was of how much jack fruit I had left despite eating a good bit and giving about 20 fruits away. In fact, even ignoring the half that I had not cleaned, I had a daunting amount of fruit.
The verdict: Jack fruit has a pleasing and different taste, so this could easily be a regular part of my fruit diet, EXCEPT that it comes in such an overwhelming quantity. This is a fruit for special occasions when you have lots of hands to help and mouths to feed such as Thanksgiving or a luau.
When ripe the jack fruit falls off the tree, says http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/05/01/308708000/heres-the-scoop-on-jackfruit-a-ginormous-fruit-to-feed-the-world. I advise against napping under a jack fruit tree.
Exactly what environmental pressures led to the evolution of this formidable fruit? Did it evolve to withstand some fearsome frugivore, perhaps a prehistoric fruit bat? Or perhaps jack fruit started off small and plant breeders have managed to increase its size. If so, I hope they can they transfer this gene to cherries.
A couple of days later, desperate for ways to draw down my overhang of jack fruit, I put some in my blender and made a smoothie, which I decanted into a glass. When I put the glass to my mouth, however, I found that the jack fruit was too viscous and would not flow to my mouth, so I had to eat it with a spoon. It tasted like jack fruit but had the look and consistency of baby food.
A jack fruit produces so much fruit that to avoid waste one feels compelled to eat and eat until one is sick of it. As Marx would say, this is the inherent contradiction of jack fruit.
The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/23/jackfruit-miracle-crop-climate-change-food-security says, "...jack fruit ... could be a replacement for wheat, corn and other staple crops under threat from climate change." This article continues, "It is easy to grow. It survives pests and diseases and high temperatures. It is drought resistant....It achieves what farmers need in food production when facing a lot of challenges under climate change." [Can you imagine driving through Iowa and seeing fields of jack fruit extending to the horizon?] Finally, "The fruit is rich in potassium, calcium and iron,... making it more nutritious than current starchy staples." One jack fruit researcher says, "It's a miracle. It can provide so many nutrients and calories--everything.... If you just eat 10 or 12 bulbs of this fruit, you don't need food for another half a day." It is speculated that jack fruit could be the key to preventing food wars, which the World Bank predicts could happen in the next decade. (This reminds me that in the eighties I read that amaranth was the food of the future. Now I mainly see it as a weed in my back yard.)
According to Wikipedia, jack fruit is an invasive species in Brazil, where marmosets gorge on it. This has allowed marmosets to expand their range; since they prey on birds, this causes declines in bird populations.
One Internet expert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FdyDBrEPA claims that Juicy Fruit gum took its flavor from jack fruit.
Your party tip is to put a new slant on old party games by playing pin the tail on the jack fruit and spin the jack fruit. If your guests are too sophisticated for this, then haul in a jack fruit and ask your guests to guess what it is. You will get guesses all over the map such as a dinosaur egg, a time capsule, a football used by the Ultimate Football League, a Richard Serra sculpture, a sea urchin that has made the transition to land, an object from the other side of the looking glass, a pod brought to earth by a UFO that contains the spores of an advance guard of alien invaders, a fossilized tear of the beast of Baluchistan, and a throw pillow. Then astound your perplexed guests by butchering it and feeding to them this improbable but indescribably delicious fruit. As a final flourish, boil down the exuded latex and fashion it into souvenir rubber bands for your guests to take home as a memento of your party.
Rick
P.S. If you read the text above carefully, you noticed that the first Fruit Explorer video has been made. The rationale for this video is that with all the perplexities surrounding this picturesque but totally unknown fruit--difficulty in cutting it, the specter of latex, the problem of figuring out what was good to eat, determining how to butcher it, and so forth--it seemed likely that there would be set-backs and blunders when I cut into it. To capture these hilarious foul-ups, a video was made of this one-time-only event. In the end, nothing went awry, but if you wish you can view the video at https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=eafd32a44851db10&id=EAFD32A44851DB10%21143&Bsrc=Share&Bpub=SDX.SkyDrive&authkey=%21AuQva1-Qbl_PTTA&v=3
P.P.S. Below are a few more images of this charismatic fruit.
