Summer encounters with India’s new superstar fruit

Relishing jackfruit in different forms for a delightful culinary journey

During the lockdown, you would have missed seasonal fruits like mango and jackfruit.  You would have managed to get mangoes through shops or through friends who were helping farmers find buyers for ripe fruit from mango-orchards.  If you love jackfruit though, it is unlikely you could get any this summer as that people do not buy the whole fruit but cut and ready-to-eat.

The stay-at-home regime across the globe has given rise to many changes in people’s culinary habits.  Cooking at home is now more frequent and a necessity.  Sale of cooking ingredients has gone up, and some foods are becoming popular through new trends.

One fascinating trend that has peaked during COVID-19 is that jackfruit is finding new favour as an alternative to meat and as a nutrient-rich food.  In keeping with hype food trend spotters create, they have hailed jackfruit as the next superfood.  Note that this is one more common Indian food that finds favour abroad after Indians have known it for many thousands of years.

Jackfruit has been a favourite among vegans and vegetarians looking for faux meat.  Tender or unripe jackfruit has a meat-like texture in dishes, and some people think it feels like artichokes when cooked. Jackfruit’s popularity in south-east Asia and South-Asia is more as a fruit though people also eat jackfruit seeds and tender jackfruit.

Jackfruit is a native of India and some other countries in the region.  Jackfruit is the state fruit of two Indian states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu and of two countries, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

About a month before the lockdown, in February 2020, we bought jackfruit from a vendor at Tembhi Naka.  He was selling jackfruit and jackfruit seeds at the same price of one hundred twenty rupees at kg. and we had purchased both.    We at the jackfruit soon after bringing it home and had kept the jackfruit seed in our refrigerator.  Those seeds after drying in the sun were ready for cooking, and we used them in a festival meal on Gudi Padwa, the first day of Indian’s nation-wide lockdown.

In December 2019, on a Sunday morning, I was at Anna’s Five States, Five Tastes restaurant and ordered jackfruit dosa.  This sweet dosa is yellowish from the colour of jackfruit ground and added to it. Anna’s restaurant serves jackfruit dosa with chutney and sambhar, and the batter did not have added sugar.  Some homes added jaggery to a jackfruit dosa to make it sweeter.  Jackfruit dosa is not very common but is on the menu of some Udipir restaurants in Mumbai region.  That dosa reminds me of jackfruit ice cream served at Naturals ice cream, not too sweet but a unique flavour and liked by some customers.

In Karnataka and even in Kerala, people use jackfruit leaves to make a cup with small sticks to hold the leaves together.

Idli batter is poured into those leaf cups and steamed in an idli cooker.  This dish is called Khotto, in Konkani, and Khotte Kadubu in Kannada.

The word Khotto means a sachet or the jackfruit leaf-cup.  The jackfruit leaves impart a nice flavour the idli, and as the leaves are disposable, the dish saves water used for washing idli-moulds. 

At Thane, the best choice to shop jackfruits from the pushcarts on the streets.  Jack fruit is available on Gokhale Road, Tembhi Naka and Jambhali Naka.  You can find hawkers near Saket Towers in the corner where fruit sellers have their stalls.  Unless you are game to handling the sticky wax of jackfruit, you are better off buying a cut fruit.  You can use any oil to avoid getting wax from a jackfruit on your fingers.  You should even the knife use to cut a jackfruit with oil to prevent it from getting coated with wax.

 Jackfruit is suitable for storage in the refrigerator but has a powerful odour.  Though some people like jackfruit, others may dislike it and may not tolerate the smell of ripe jackfruit.  You run the risk of having your refrigerator smell of jackfruit if you don’t cover the stored fruit inside a container with a tight-fitting lid.  Also, as the fruit has a strong flavour, your shopping bag, vehicle and even your whole home can smell of jackfruit when you bring it.

After you eat jackfruit, you should separate the seeds and immediately remove the soft tissue covering each seed.  The seed is then ready for drying, which you can easily do by putting the seeds out in the sun for a few days.  Jackfruit seeds are rich in starch and very prone to spoilage by fungi.

You can preserve them for eating by drying them and storing them in a refrigerator.  Any seed with a cut should be either used immediately as food before it spoils or discarded.  Any incision on a seed causes it to become mouldy and make the seed unfit for consumption.

Fungus-affected seeds have black spots on them and some of such seeds bloat, another sign of spoilage.

Jackfruit is a versatile fruit that can be eaten fresh and also cooked.  Unripe jackfruit is a popular vegetable and available at Jambhali Naka and Urbania’s Daily Fresh supermarket.  At Jambhali Naka, vendors cut raw jackfruit and remove the pimple-like surface of the skin and offer it to shoppers. 

In Kerala and Karnataka, chips from jackfruit made of unripe jackfruits and fried in coconut soil are a typical snack and delicacy.  Those chips have a golden-yellow colour and taste unique from their flavour and that of the frying oil. 

Jackfruit halwa is another delicacy of the west coast of India.  In that jackfruit dish which has jaggery, the sugar in the fruit caramelises giving a dark brown colour to the halwa.  Halwa is a very popular chewy-sweet in the Mangalore region and also in different parts of Kerala.

Southern Kerala is known for another jackfruit delicacy called Chakkavarati.  This jackfruit preserve is made with minced jackfruit in jaggery syrup and very popular for use in making payasam.  Chakkavarati is so appealing in taste it is also eaten straight as a dessert.  It is so popular that fresh stocks for sale are quickly lapped up by eager customers and is not available for long after annual jackfruit season.

At Urbania, we have a jackfruit tree at the Urban Farming Zone which you can visit after the lockdown.