Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Koreanish jackfruit

One hot day, we needed lunch, I had recently read this article on Bo Ssam, and I had a can of young jackfruit. (I probably bought it intending to make jackfruit carnitas.)

I cooked the jackfruit in the pressure cooker for 20 minutes, with seasonings inspired by the Korean BBQ sauce from Fatfree Vegan. I then shredded it to end up with this:
We ate the jackfruit in lettuce leaves, with a bunch of stuff from the fridge: cold leftover rice vermicelli, pickled shiitakes, sauerkraut (standing in for kimchi), cilantro, leftover butter beans, and a made-up sauce of fermented chili bean paste, miso, sriracha and vinegar. This was an excellent meal. I'm hungry for it again, looking at the photos.
The jackfruit tasted good, but I am not really won over by the texture. I guess it is nice for a change to have a 'meaty' element to a meal that is not seitan or tofu. But I think I am just lukewarm on it because when I was a meat-eater, I never ate meaty foods that have that particular falling-apart texture. (I never tried American-style barbecue or carnitas, for example. I bet people that miss those foods get a bit more out of jackfruit than I do.)