Jackfruit carnitas

Courtesy of the new Hot Knives book, jackfruit carnitas:

I dehydrated the jackfruit (in my new dehydrator!) for about 2 hours, then smoked it (in the stovetop smoker) for about 25 minutes. (The recipe actually called for a long, slow smoke on an outdoor grill, but I don't have one.) Then it went into an ancho and chipotle chile sauce inspired by the Hot Knives recipe. This is definitely the way to go with jackfruit: the dehydration step gives it a great texture, and readies it for soaking up the sauce.

Here's the dehydrated and smoked, and then torn-up, jackfruit before it went into the sauce:

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.)