Ingredient

Jackfruit

Jackfruit is an enormous tropical fruit that behaves as two entirely different ingredients depending on when it is picked. Unripe it is starchy, neutral and fibrous, and it shreds into something that resembles pulled meat. Ripe it is intensely sweet and perfumed, more like a mango crossed with a banana. Almost every confusion about jackfruit comes from not knowing which one a recipe means.

The two jackfruits

Young / green / unripe

Sold tinned in brine or water, or fresh in South Asian shops. Firm, pale, almost flavourless, with a fibrous structure. Used as a vegetable in curries across South and Southeast Asia, and in the West as a meat substitute.

Ripe

Sold fresh in segments, tinned in syrup, or dried. Bright yellow, very sweet, strongly perfumed — a mixture of banana, pineapple and bubblegum. A dessert fruit.

Tinned in brine or water

This is the one for savoury cooking. Rinse it well.

Tinned in syrup

This is the ripe one. It will not work in a savoury dish, and using it by mistake is the single most common jackfruit error.

Seeds

Edible in both, boiled or roasted, and taste rather like chestnuts. Almost always thrown away in the West.

Why unripe jackfruit shreds like meat

The flesh of a young jackfruit is arranged in bundles of long fibres. When it is cooked and then pressed or pulled with a fork, those bundles separate into strands with a genuinely meat-like appearance and a chewy, slightly stringy texture.

That is where the resemblance ends, and it is worth being honest about. Jackfruit has very little protein, so it is not nutritionally a meat substitute; and it has almost no flavour of its own, so it contributes nothing but texture and whatever you season it with.

Both of those are manageable if you know about them. Season it hard. Jackfruit will absorb an alarming quantity of spice, smoke, salt and acid and still taste under-seasoned if you approach it timidly. And brown it — dry-frying or roasting the shredded flesh before saucing it makes an enormous difference, because it drives off water and lets the edges catch.

Using a tin of young jackfruit

1. Drain and rinse it thoroughly. The brine is assertive and will otherwise dominate.
2. Trim the hard core from each piece if it is very firm — the triangular pointed end. In many tins the pieces are soft enough to leave.
3. Squeeze the pieces to remove water, then shred them with your fingers or two forks. They come apart readily.
4. Dry the shreds as much as you can, on a cloth or kitchen paper. Wet jackfruit will not brown.
5. Fry or roast the shreds in oil, hard, until they colour at the edges and dry out. This step is what separates good jackfruit from mush.
6. Now add your sauce, spice or marinade, and cook it in. Taste, and season considerably more than you expected to.

What to make with each

• Young — pulled jackfruit in barbecue sauce, in a bun with slaw. The Western signature dish, and it works if the shreds are browned first.
• Young — jackfruit curry. Kathal in North India, polos ambula in Sri Lanka, and versions across Southeast Asia. This is the traditional use and generally the better one.
• Young — in tacos, with chipotle, lime and coriander.
• Young — as a filling for pies, wraps and dumplings.
• Ripe — eaten as it is, in segments. This is what most jackfruit in the world is used for.
• Ripe — in ice cream, smoothies and desserts, where its perfume carries.
• Ripe — dried into crisps, which are widely sold and very good.
• Seeds — boiled or roasted, salted, eaten like chestnuts.

Common questions