Perhaps to an outsider it seems forbidden. Its reptilian skin recalls aspects of a dormant dragon. When ripe, the scent is quite strong. (Like durians, they are not allowed on planes.) Then there’s the issue of unwieldy size. Jackfruit is huge. It is the largest fruit that the tree bears. According to Guinness World Records, the heaviest specimen on record was recorded in 2016 in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, measuring about 2 feet long, more than 4 feet in circumference, and weighing 94 pounds, 2.9 ounces. Rivals for the title include a 144-pounder who was reportedly spotted at a jackfruit festival in the southern Indian state of Kerala in 2010.
It was in Kerala that American poet and essayist Amy Nezukumatasil tasted jackfruit for the first time at the age of eight. When she was visiting her paternal grandparents, she knew them through the carefully populated aerial photos they sent to her every few months. Her neighbors weren’t sure what to make of the half-Indian, half-Filipino girl from Chicago with a bobbed hair, short shorts, and pink glasses. “It’s too much,” he explained. Then they saw her munching on jackfruit and realized that she was one of them too after all.
In her new collection of essays, “Every Bite: Nutrition and Jamboree,” Nezukumatasil writes that her grandfather “cut open the skin of a pebble and found a pale yellow fruit filled with the sweetest juice I had ever tasted before or since.” “The petals appeared,” he recalled. Jackfruit, like pineapple, is a so-called multi-fruit made up of many small fruits joined together. To her child’s eyes, the mass of flesh that had grown from the sun-drunk flower looked “like a golden tulip head.”
Fresh jackfruit is hard to come by in Oxford, Michigan, where Nezukumatasil currently lives. But in 2020, when food was in short supply due to the pandemic, she found canned young jackfruit at a local store. “Nobody was using it in Mississippi,” she says with a laugh. She bought 5 cans. At home, I tried to learn how to eat it in a new way, not as a snack or dessert, but as the center of delicious dishes.
This is because jackfruit is not sweet at all if it is canned unripe. The pulp is parchment-white, like a blank canvas, and is completely unpretentious in flavor and will accept any seasoning. It has a firm texture, can withstand the heat of a pot, and can be pulled into strings like pork. It has a chewy texture and has recently become popular among vegetarians in the United States as a meat substitute (albeit relatively low in protein). “It’s as close as you can get to tearing flesh,” Nezukumatasil says.
