Jackfruit

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The jackfruit, Artocarpus heterophyllus, can weigh as much as 55 kilograms, which makes it the largest fruit that grows on a tree. A mature tree produces around 200 of them each year, and older trees can bear up to 500. This giant belongs to the fig, mulberry, and breadfruit family, known to botanists as Moraceae.

  Some of the questions it raises are simple. Why does a fruit this heavy hang from the trunk instead of the twigs? Where did its English name come from, and who first wrote it down?

  Others are stranger. How did a tropical fruit end up in grocery stores as a stand-in for meat? Why do park managers in Rio de Janeiro treat it as a problem? And what holds together the tree, the insects, and the people who depend on it?

  31421

• 2. A Name Across Languages

  ›

  In 1563, the physician and naturalist Garcia de Orta added the word jaca to his book Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India. Europeans had met the fruit only recently. The Portuguese Empire reached Calicut, on the Malabar Coast of India, in 1499, and jaca came from the Malayalam word chakka.

  Hendrik van Rheede, who lived from 1636 to 1691, later recorded the Malayalam name chakka in the third volume of his Hortus Malabaricus. The English word jackfruit grew out of that Portuguese borrowing.

  Centuries later, the botanist Ralph Randles Stewart offered a different idea. He suggested the fruit was named for William Jack, a Scottish botanist who lived from 1795 to 1822. Jack worked for the East India Company in Bengal, Sumatra, and Malaya. He was born more than two centuries after Orta's book appeared, so the Portuguese trail has the stronger paper record.

  In the Philippines, English speakers say nangka, a word borrowed from Tagalog. It has relatives in Cebuano, where it is nangkà, and in Malay. All of them belong to the Austronesian language family. Beneath chakka itself lies a Proto-Dravidian root, kā(y), which meant fruit or vegetable.

  1011121516

• 3. Anatomy of a Giant

  ›

  A jackfruit tree is an evergreen with a short trunk and a dense crown, and it easily reaches 9 to 21 meters in height. The trunk measures 30 to 80 centimeters across and sometimes forms buttress roots. The bark is smooth and reddish-brown. Any injury to it releases a milky sap.

  Young trees carry leaves with irregularly lobed or split edges. On older trees, the thick, gummy leaves turn rounded and dark green, with smooth margins. They are arranged alternately in a spiral along the twig.

  Flower clusters appear directly on the trunk, branches, or twigs, a habit called cauliflory. Each tree is monoecious, so it carries both female and male flowers. Blooming runs from December until February or March. The pollen grains are tiny, around 60 microns across, and the male inflorescences drop off after the pollen is shed.

  The fruit itself is a multiple fruit, formed when the ovaries of many flowers fuse together. It ripens from yellowish-green to yellow, then to yellowish-brown at maturity. The hard, gummy shell is covered in hexagonal tubercles. Fruits run from 30 to 100 centimeters long and 15 to 50 centimeters across.

  Inside sits a fibrous whitish core, 5 to 10 centimeters thick. Individual fruits about 10 centimeters long radiate from it, each holding a seed. A single jackfruit may contain 100 to 500 seeds. By share, an average fruit is 27 percent edible seed coat, 15 percent edible seeds, and 10 percent core. About 20 percent is white pulp and bark. The fruit matures in the rainy season, from July to August.

  When fully ripe, the pulp smells of pineapple and banana, though some people find the aroma pleasant and others do not. A study of five cultivars found that the main aroma compounds included ethyl isovalerate and propyl isovalerate.

  The pulp has a messy side. The core releases a sticky, milky liquid that resists soap and water, so an oil or other solvent is needed to clean the hands. In Tanzania, street vendors who sell the fruit in small segments hand customers little bowls of kerosene.

  1421222324

• 4. Invader and Partners

  ›

  In Brazil's Tijuca Forest National Park in Rio de Janeiro, the jackfruit has become an invasive species. The same trouble appears at the Horto Florestal in neighbouring Niterói. The Tijuca is largely an artificial secondary forest, planted from the middle of the nineteenth century, and jackfruit trees have grown there since the park was founded.

  Common marmosets and coatis drive the spread. Fruits fall to the ground and split open, and these small mammals eat them eagerly. The animals then disperse the seeds, and the new trees compete for space with native species.

  The feast also feeds the animals. The supply of jackfruit has allowed marmoset and coati populations to grow. Both prey opportunistically on bird eggs and nestlings, so more of them means worse odds for local birds.

  Pollination in cultivation involves smaller players. Stingless bees such as Tetragonula iridipennis pollinate jackfruit, and so matter to growers. A three-way mutualism also seems to be at work, joining the flower, a fungus, and a gall midge named Clinidiplosis ultracrepidata. The fungus forms a film over the fruit clusters, and that film feeds both the fly larvae and the adult flies.

  2627

• 5. Orchards and Markets

  ›

  Nobody knows exactly where the jackfruit began, though the Western Ghats may be its birthplace. Early cultivation also took place in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, southern China, and the East Indies. Archaeological findings in India show the fruit was grown there 3,000 to 6,000 years ago. Filipino settlers later carried it to Guam, when both places belonged to the Spanish Empire.

  Growers do little pruning. Dead branches inside the tree are cut only sometimes. Twigs that bore fruit are twisted or cut back to the trunk to encourage growth for the next season, and branches are pruned every three to four years to keep the tree productive. Trees that carry too many mediocre fruits are thinned so the rest mature better.

  In 2017, India produced 1.4 million tonnes of jackfruit, ahead of Bangladesh, Thailand, and Indonesia. Marketing involves three groups: producers, traders, and middlemen such as wholesalers and retailers. Large farms sell immature fruit to wholesalers, which helps cash flow and lowers risk. Medium-sized farms sell directly to local markets or retailers.

  Outside its countries of origin, fresh jackfruit appears in food markets throughout Southeast Asia, and it is extensively cultivated along the Brazilian coast. Sri Lanka and Vietnam have established industries that turn it into flour, noodles, papad, and ice cream. Canned, frozen, and dried versions sell year-round.

  As reported in 2019, jackfruit became more widely available in US grocery stores, cleaned and ready to cook. Restaurants began offering it as taco filling and in vegan versions of pulled pork.

  932311436

• 6. Ripe and Unripe

  ›

  Ripe jackfruit tastes like a blend of apple, pineapple, mango, and banana. In Indochina, two varieties are recognized. The hard version is crunchier, drier, less sweet, and fleshier. The soft version is moister and much sweeter, with darker gold flesh.

  Unripe jackfruit is treated as a vegetable. Canned green jackfruit has a mild taste and a meat-like texture, which is why it is called vegetable meat. The skin must be peeled first, and the flesh is chopped and cooked before serving. The finished chunks resemble prepared artichoke hearts in taste and color.

  The seeds, once cooked, taste milky and sweet, and cooks often compare them to Brazil nuts. They can be boiled, baked, or roasted, and roasted seeds are likened to chestnuts. Dehydrated seeds can be ground into a thickener for soup, or milled together with wheat into flour. After roasting, the seeds can even serve as a commercial alternative to chocolate aroma. Young leaves are tender enough to cook as a vegetable.

  A 100 gram portion of raw pulp provides 95 kilocalories. The pulp is 74 percent water, 23 percent carbohydrate, 2 percent protein, and 1 percent fat. It is a moderate source of vitamin B6, vitamin C, and potassium, each supplying 10 to 19 percent of the Daily Value. The fruit is described as a partial solution for food security in developing countries.

  1421382930

• 7. Regional Tables

  ›

  Southern India has a traditional breakfast of idlis, which use jackfruit along with rice, and jackfruit leaves serve as the wrapping for steaming. Two varieties predominate in India. Muttomvarikka has slightly hard flesh when ripe, while sindoor is soft. Sri Lankans call them waraka and wela.

  Chakkavaratti is a jackfruit jam made by seasoning pieces of muttomvarikka in jaggery, and it keeps for many months. Ground into a paste and spread on a mat to dry in the sun, the fruit becomes a chewy candy. In Bangladesh, the seed is often dried and preserved to be used later in curry.

  In Indonesia and Malaysia, the fruit is called nangka. Ripe pieces are mixed with shaved ice in desserts such as es campur and es teler, or dried and fried as kripik nangka. The boiled seeds, eaten with salt, are called beton. Young fruit becomes a curry named gulai nangka or a stew called gudeg.

  In the Philippines, unripe langka is cooked in coconut milk and eaten with rice, a dish called ginataang langka. Ripe fruit goes into halo-halo and the Filipino turon.

  Vietnam makes a sweet dessert soup called jackfruit chè, and uses the purée in pastry fillings or on xôi ngọt, a sweet version of sticky rice. Thailand cuts, cans, and freezes the fruit for export, frequently to North America and Europe. Taiwan grows it mainly in the eastern part of the island, where it is eaten fresh, dried, candied, or made into jam.

  Brazil recognizes three varieties. The jaca-dura, or hard type, has firm flesh and the largest fruits, weighing 15 to 40 kilograms each. The jaca-mole is the soft type, with smaller, sweeter fruits. The jaca-manteiga, or butter type, falls in between. Many Brazilian recipes use jackfruit as vegan meat.

  In Africa, the tree began as a shade tree in gardens before it became a source of recipes. The seeds are boiled or roasted to remove toxic substances. The flesh of the unripe fruit goes into a savory dish with smoked pork.

  1425333528

• 8. Wood and Ceremony

  ›

  In Sri Lanka, jackfruit timber is important enough to be exported to Europe. The golden yellow wood has a good grain and resists termites. In India it is considered superior to teak for building furniture. It is also used for doors, windows, roof construction, and fish sauce barrels.

  Musicians rely on it too. In Indonesia, hardwood from the trunk is carved out to form the barrels of gamelan drums. In the Philippines, the soft wood becomes the body of the kutiyapi, a boat lute. In India, it forms the body of the veena and the drums called mridangam, thimila, and kanjira.

  In Kerala, the ornate wooden plank called avani palaka, made from jackfruit wood, serves as the priest's seat during Hindu ceremonies. Vietnam prizes the wood for carving Buddhist statues in temples. Buddhist forest monastics in Southeast Asia use the heartwood as a dye, which gives their robes a distinctive light-brown color.

  Jackfruit is the national fruit of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and the state fruit of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Kerala also hosts jackfruit festivals.

  4041424547