Hailed as a vegan sensation to a western world just discovering its benefits, the jackfruit has always been a part of the Indian kitchen
InIndia, getting a jackfruit home is an event. The day is planned in advance. A space is cleared out, paper spread on the floor, windows opened to let out the smell and a bottle of coconut oil kept handy. The guest of honor arrives in style — from the garden, the market, or as a gift — weighing down the person carrying it. First, hands are liberally dosed with oil. A large knife or a sickle-like instrument, also oiled, is used to break it open. The quartered fruit is divided among the waiting people, who quickly pull out the fleshy pods and seeds, discarding the rest. This is how we treated jackfruit in Goa, before cleaned jackfruit became freely available in markets and supermarket shelves.
“India is the mother country of jackfruit. Jackfruit has been growing on its own here for centuries; it wasn’t farmed or cultivated,” development journalist Shree Padre told me. The editor of Kannada farm magazine Adike Patrike, Padre has been researching and writing on the fruit for over a decade. “It is a raw material that can be used in thousands of different preparations. There is no other raw material that can match it,” he explains.
The jackfruit is not necessarily a pretty sight: it is big, heavy with a spiky skin, fleshy but not juicy, with a dense, sweet taste and an almost sickly, sweet smell.
India is the largest producer of jackfruit in the world, and long believed to be its place of origin. Jackfruit gets its name from the Portuguese jaca, in turn derived from the Malayali chakka. It grows in the Western Ghats, in the south, and at scattered locations in the north and east. There are dedicated jackfruit festivals held across Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Goa and in the North East. The fruit makes for an excellent gift in smaller villages, especially during festivals. It even makes its way into common parlance: in Kannada, hasidu halasu tinnu, undu maavu tinnu (loosely: eat jackfruit when hungry, eat mango when full) and in Bengal, summers are synonymous with aam kanthaler gandho (loosely: fragrance of mango and jackfruit). It is used in different ways all across the country, where it goes by different names: kathal (Hindi), kothaal (Assamese), chakka (Malayali), phanas (Marathi), ponos (Konkani), halasa (Kannadiga).
The jackfruit is not necessarily a pretty sight: it is big, heavy with a spiky skin, fleshy but not juicy, with a dense, sweet taste and an almost sickly, sweet smell. As a crop, it is easy to cultivate, grows well in neglected conditions, and gives abundant yield. The fruit and nuts are nutritious: packed with protein, dietary fibre, vitamins A and C, and a fair amount of minerals. The leaves become feed cattle, the roots are considered medicinal and the wood is turned into furniture. The fruit is cooked when raw, both semi-ripe and ripe.
You might say it’s a… jack of all fruits.
Globally, people often find the smell of jackfruit too pungent and the texture too slimy. It is heavy, the fruit cannot be finished quickly, and making it ready to eat is cumbersome. It is little wonder much of it goes to waste. There are no official figures but Padre believes that only one-third of the cultivated fruit gets utilized. “Jackfruit (unlike other fruits like mango) hasn’t suffered a year of crop failure,” said Padre. “It never fails its master. It deserves to be recognized.”
Fruit of the matter
The biggest advantage of the jackfruit is its versatility. It is eaten as a vegetable when tender, raw, or semi-ripe, and as a fruit when ripe. As a vegetable, it finds its way into curries and stews, dry stir-fry, and biryani. It is deep-fried as koftas and fritters, dried and fried as chips, and pickled. The sun-dried seeds go into curries or are just roasted and eaten as snacks. Food is steamed in the leaves. Even the core is sometimes cooked. The ripe fruit is used in sweets, syrups, jams and chutneys. Recently, in Goa, Hansel Vaz of Cazulo Premium Feni and bartender Rohan Barbosa have experimented with a jackfruit cocktail. Castaad Ponos uses a syrup made of the fruit mixed with cashew feni, to create a sour.
Jackfruit is revered in the South. India has the highest number of red flesh jackfruit (or chandra halasu) trees, a milder and less sweet version of the yellow fruit commonly found elsewhere. Panruthi in Tamil Nadu is known as a jackfruit paradise. There, jackfruit is farmed on over 10,000 hectares of land and farmers are solely dependent on it. No fruit here goes to waste. In Kochi, T Mohandas grew tired of the jackfruit being wasted in his garden. Together, he and a friend created a WhatAapp group (Chakkakkoottam) and invited people over. Since April, these social gathering see people travel from afar to share jackfruit and their stories about it. Some even carry fruit from their gardens, homemade products, and saplings to share. Mohandas’ trees are now bare, nothing goes to waste.
The tree is so abundant in Kerala, every household usually has one. We end up using the jackfruit wherever possible
In Kerala, the chakka is the official state fruit and finds form in chips, halwas, jams, curries and even ice cream. Kerala also boasts the only jackfruit-dedicated restaurant in the country. Alnas Chakka Restaurant in Muttippala has 30 preparations of the fruit including pakodas, payasam, bajji (fritters), cutlets, biryani, and drinks and desserts including jackfruit milkshakes, juices, sherbet, and soda. Throughout Kerala you can find coffee powder, jackfruit seed pickles, chutney powders, packaged halwa, barfi and biscuits.
“The tree is so abundant in Kerala, every household usually has one. We end up using the jackfruit wherever possible,” said Bhawani Balasubramanian, a banker from Kerala who now lives in Mumbai. She uses ripe jackfruit to make sweets like Chakka Pradhaman. Ripe jackfruit is cooked till soft, added to a kadhai with jaggery and stirred continuously till it becomes soft and thick (halwa-like consistency). This mixture when cooled stays refrigerated for a year. “When you want to eat it, take a portion and heat it in ghee with some coconut milk. Add some coconut slivers on top and that’s it,” she says.
This tendency to use jackfruit and create something that can be eaten later is replicated elsewhere too. Some regions make jackfruit pappad and in Goa, Saath or Sattam (fruit leather) is a common rainy day snack. Goans, traditionally, eat two kinds of jackfruit, the softer rassal, and the firmer kaapo. “We remove the seed from the rassal fruit, put everything in the mixer and create a paste that is dried for five six days. This toffee-like treat was typically eaten in the monsoons months when we had cravings for the fruit. Now we store it through the year,” says said Veena Kantak, a psychiatrist in Margao, Goa.
Forget pineapples on pizzas, Goans eat their pineapple with jackfruit! The semi-ripened fruit is paired with pineapple in a sweet and spicy curry Ansa Ponsachem Tondak The curry is popular with the Goan Saraswat Brahmin community and has tropical fruits like pineapple, jackfruit and sometimes, mango. “This is a special dish you will find this at all of our weddings in the summer. People love it because it is rare to get these fruits together otherwise,” says Kantak. In her home, the fruit is eaten as it grows, raw to semi-ripe and then ripe. There’s a raw kuvlo and bhikna (tender seeds) tondak, a grated coconut dish with shrimp or a sushel — chutney with coconut, sesame seeds and jaggery and Pansachem Dhonas: a cake made with ripe jackfruit, Goan palm jaggery and coconut.
Ponsachem Fest had demos on cooking the fruit and seeds, cutting the jackfruit, grafting the plant, and stalls selling Sattam, Dhonas, bhoje (fritters), Pudde (sweet rice cones steamed in jackfruit leaves) and even jackfruit coffee.
“In the olden days, the abundance of jackfruit meant there was a lot left over. Some people turned it into sattam to send to relatives abroad. My family would send sattam and dried seeds to use in curries all the way to Kenya,” said Marius Fernandes, known as Goa’s Festival Man for his work in highlighting old, forgotten festivals. In June, Fernandes helped curate a festival dedicated to jackfruit and its uses in Goan homes. Ponsachem Fest had demos on cooking the fruit and seeds, cutting the jackfruit, grafting the plant, and stalls selling Sattam, Dhonas, bhoje (fritters), Pudde (sweet rice cones steamed in jackfruit leaves) and even jackfruit coffee. This festival coincides with Sao Joao (St Joseph’s feast). “In the olden days, newly-married couples would return to the brides’ village during Sao Joao carrying food to share. Everyone shared the gifts, and there was always music and procession.”
Before refrigerators came into Goan homes, dried jackfruit seeds were preserved inside mud mounds. When dry, the mud would harden creating the perfect case for the seeds, keeping them dry and away from fungus. Fernandes, on learning about this system, created this structure at the last Ponsachem Fest. “The festival is a way of showing how jackfruit has always been a part of our lives,” he concluded.
Vegetarian meat
The raw and semi-ripe jackfruit is considered a vegetable rather than a fruit. Raw jackfruit easily takes on the tastes of the masalas used to cook it, and it’s much more common in the north.
Jackfruit Kaapas (fritters) are a common sight in Sunetra Sil Vijaykar’s Pathare Prabhu home in Mumbai. The jackfruit is chopped, marinated in chilli, tamarind and salt, coated in a rice flour batter and slow roasted in ghee. Tripura has a simple jackfruit seed and lentil curry, Kothalor Chakoi. Coorg has Chekké Kuru Pajji (Karnataka) chutney made with the seeds. Konkan has Phansachi Bhaji — a raw jackfruit preparation with coconut.
Jackfruit has recently increased in popularity globally, due to preparations that treat the plant as a meat substitute. It can take on a texture and taste similar to animal meat, if treated right. Many restaurants experiment and play with this characteristic. In Bengaluru, chef Manu Chandra serves a Pulled Young Jackfruit Tacos with smoked goat cheese. Mumbai’s Ummrao serves a Kathal ka Haleem (with asparagus, broken wheat, cous cous and rose water) and a Kathal Biryani. Mumbai’s modern Goan restaurant, O Pedro, the fiery tangy vindaloo replaces the traditional pork with jackfruit to create a Jackfruit Vindaloo Taco.
“My earliest memory of jackfruit was my uncle telling me there was mutton for dinner. As a greedy child I got really excited and at dinner time, was disappointed to find jackfruit curry. Then he told me that this was mutton from goats that grown on trees.”
Journalist and food writer Vernika Awal’s Punjabi home eats the jackfruit in a pickle form, or cooked like they would a rich mutton curry (Kathal ki Sabzi). Food writer Shirin Mehrotra’s family prepares jackfruit in a stew-like curry, as koftas and a Besanwale Kathal made by stir frying boiled jackfruit and besan till crisp.
In Bengali households, jackfruit is commonly called gaach patha (tree goat). “My earliest memory of jackfruit was my uncle telling me there was mutton for dinner. As a greedy child I got really excited and at dinner time, was disappointed to find jackfruit curry. Then he told me that this was mutton from goats that grown on trees,” recollects Priyadarshini Chatterjee, food writer from Kolkata. Though seven-year old Chatterjee didn’t enjoy that ‘mutton curry’, she developed a taste for it as she grew up. Back then, the fruit was bought from the bazaar or there would be sackfuls sent from their farmhouse in Hooghly. The ones fit for curies, the unripe ones or enchor, were separated from the ripe ones or kathal. “We kids would often complain about the smell when kathal was kept in the fridge,” she says. Enchor was cut into cubes and cooked like meat in a curry (Kalia Doi Enchor), a lighter curry (Enchor’er Dalna), with prawns (Enchor Chingri), with bitter gourds (Enchor Shukto) or a kofta (Enchor’er Kopta). It had a distinct bite even after cooking.
Growing up in Goa, I didn’t know raw jackfruit could be cooked in a curry. That’s the beauty of this fruit, it means something different to every person.
“In UP, Delhi and Bihar, the jackfruit was used as a replacement for mutton by people who had to feed large gatherings, especially during festivals like Holi, and couldn’t afford meat. It tasted [just] as good,” said Anubhuti Krishna, a food and travel writer who grew up in Uttar Pradesh. Krishna prefers buying the small and raw jackfruit and will ignore the fibrous ones. This she uses to make the family favourite Kathal ka Pulao with onions, garam masala and Basmati rice. “It’s like a biryani but better”.
Because of its use as a vegetable, it is not rare to find people who haven’t eaten ripe jackfruit. Awal and Mehrotra only realized the ripe fruit was eaten after they moved to Mumbai. Krishna had only heard stories, “I didn’t know how to eat it.” On the other hand, growing up in Goa, I didn’t know raw jackfruit could be cooked in a curry. That’s the beauty of this fruit, it means something different to every person.
Jackfruit, for me, is heavy with nostalgia. For us kids’, watching the cleaning of the jackfruit was a fascinating process. We were tasked with watching over the seeds as they dried in the sun and shooing away any interested crows. For a job well done, we would be rewarded with the ripe fruit. After moving from my village in Goa to Mumbai city, I still eat jackfruit, specially cleaned and cut. But, it doesn’t have the same charm of sitting around the table during summer, breathing in the pungent aroma and digging into a fleshy, stringy piece of fruit.
https://medium.com/tenderlymag/jackfruit-india-eee207285d87
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