The world is full of interesting things to eat and drink, yet most of us get to taste only a fraction of them. For example: I’d wager that most of us in North America had never heard of jackfruit until relatively recently—sometime in the past decade, say.
Some of that rising jackfruit awareness has been driven by vegetarian cooks looking for fleshy, plant-grown texture that can be shaped into meat-like foods. Yet still more has been driven by the inexorable movement of foods via globalization—specifically, cooking shows and social media showing us more of the world’s cuisines, and Asian markets in urban and suburban neighborhoods, there to serve immigrants, Asian-Americans, and curious cooks from anywhere.
So, what’s a jackfruit? For starters, it’s a tropical fruit in the same family as figs and mulberries, and the trees are widely grown in South and Southeast Asia. It’s also big: The fruit are among the largest in the fruit kingdom, with a few getting as big as 100 pounds (45 kg) or more, though most are around 20 to 30 pounds (9 to 14 kg).