Strange Fruit pt. 5: Jackfruit

In Michigan, where I’m from, we have large fruit; watermelons and pumpkins for example can reach great size. Sensibly, these fruits grow on trailing vines, right on the ground. But imagine a fruit that size that grows suspended from a tree! Aiee! Maybe it’s called Jackfruit because it will jack you up if it lands on you. Actually, the cultivated trees are not that tall, only a few meters, so we’re not really talking Durian kill-factor here. Still, seeing something that size just sprouting out the side of a tree is very odd, like a tumor or something. That’s my six-month-old there in the background, for scale.

Jackfruit is nangka in Malay, Artocarpus heterophyllus botanically. It is in the same family and genus as the previously mentioned Terap and the Cempedak. Underneath the green warty skin is a great mass of fleshy, sticky yellow fibers surrounding a dozen or two fruits surrounding large smooth seeds not unlike avacado seeds. The fruits themselves are also yellow, sticky and somewhat sweet. I’d have given you pictures, but Good Lord, one of those monsters can set you back 30 or 40RM! So instead here is a website with lovely photos.

The flavor is not particularly pronounced. Maybe for this reason it is frequently used like a vegetable in cooking. Often it is cooked together with coconut heart, umbut, in a coconut milk sauce. (Coconut heart is on my list to write about one of these days, if Mum-mum doesn’t beat me to it.)

The pictures you see were taken at the wonderful Ming Kiong Gardens on Airport Road. The place is a little pricey but they grow superior fruit from hybrid and improved varieties. You can be sure you’ll get a tasty orchard fruit, not some wild-gathered thing. They carry their own variety of golden mango that is available nowhere else. They also have a Jackfruit-Chempadak hybrid called nan-chem that is better than both mother fruits, in my opinion. It is more like cempadak in flavor but less gassy, and more like nangka in texture.