Jackfruit has more protein than other fruits. Photo / Sonya Holm
OPINION:
An important and precious tree from her childhood country of Sri Lanka provides Kanchana Seneviratne with her favourite food, jackfruit.
“If you have jackfruit you will never get hungry,” she says. “That’s a saying in our country.”
The trees grow up to 20 metres and produce the largest fruit, growing to a whopping 60–90cm in length and weighing anything between 18 and 55kg.
As a tropical island, Sri Lanka is home to a variety of flavours, fruits and vegetables.
“I think we have like 50 types of bananas. And we have the most delicious pineapple,” Seneviratne says.
Five types of mangoes plus coconut, rambutan, durian and jackfruit trees grow in her parent’s backyard, but despite stiff competition, jackfruit is Seneviratne’s favourite.
According to The Complete Language of Food: A Definitive and Illustrated History, jackfruit was once considered “to be a truly exotic wonder fruit of the east”.
Seneviratne tells me that while young it is cooked like a vegetable and when old eaten raw as a fruit.
With more protein than other fruits, it can be added to curries and “lots of other dishes… you can boil it like potatoes and then you can eat it like rice”.
After growing up in Sri Lanka, Seneviratne spent time in Italy and the past eight years in Palmerston North.
Seneviratne has both an appetite for languages – speaking Sinhala, Japanese, Italian, Hindi and English – and a fondness for flavour.
So I was slightly nervous when she gave me her favourite recipe for kirikos (jackfruit curry) to try at home.
Had I picked the fruit fresh from the tree, it would have taken all day to clean and prepare.
“It’s really hard to do. But the grandparents and parents, they love to do it because of the taste... It’s lots of work before you make it, but really worth it,” Seneviratne says.
As it turns out, it only took three days for a jar of whole jack in brine to arrive from Wellington. The age of the jackfruit is important for the curry, so the tins of young jackfruit readily available here were not going to work, Seneviratne says.
The other ingredients were easily found, although I used yellow mustard seeds instead of black, dry curry leaves instead of fresh, and pandan essence rather than the leaf itself.
My cinnamon was also the “sweet and woody” Gregg’s variety, rather than Ceylon Cinnamon which has been sold around the globe for 4000 years.
I was missing the traditional clay pot and the open fire of burning coconut leaves to cook my curry.
However, the style of cooking, reminiscent of the “one-pot wonder” – otherwise known as throwing it all in and hoping for the best – is one that is very familiar.
I followed the recipe, Seneviratne’s additional instructions and included a few anxious ad-libs here and there (the pandan essence was a darker green than expected so I used more curry).
My husband said, “it smells the part”, but added something unrepeatable about the colour.
The tempering (topping) provided extra crunch and flavour.
The end result was a medium-hot creamy coconut curry. The aroma filled the kitchen and tasted as good as it smelt.
The jackfruit was meltingly soft but not mushy, with a pleasant, smooth texture that soaked up the flavours.
I spent a week anticipating the dish, an hour making it and wolfed it down in minutes. Delicious.
You can get Kanchana Seneviratne’s recipe at islandsmile.org/sri-lankan-jackfruit-curry.
Sonya Holm is a freelance journalist based in Palmerston North.
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