Jack Fruit

There are a lot of fruits that grow in São Tome on a regular basis that I rarely have in the US. You can find these topical fruits, but you have to go to Whole Foods and pay a ton of money for them. Fruits like Passion Fruit, Papaya, Star Fruit, and Safu are available on every street corner and at every stand in the Market for, what amounts to, $0.30 in USD. Pineapples, 4 or 5 different types of bananas, plantains, oranges that are not orange but green, avocados, and mangos, are also everywhere. Breadfruit is also here and usually you do not have to buy it because most streets are lined with huge, beautiful, 2 toned green leaved, breadfruit trees that anyone can pull and eat off of.

Jack Fruit, however, is a fruit that I have never seen before or even heard of before. It is the ugliest fruit I have ever seen! It grows off of the trunk of trees, like a tumor, and is greenish-yellow, bumpy and sappy! A Jack Fruit is about the size of a bowling ball, but it is not round. They are oblong and bumpy with bulges at times.

To cut open a Jack Fruit, you must first dip your knife in oil so that it does not get sticky with the sap of the fruit. The women who sell it prepared (and people who prepare it in their homes) cover their hands in oil as well to prevent them from getting sappy. Once the fruit is cut in half, the first priority is to section off the fruit and cut out the white center. Jack Fruit has tons of pods in it with a seed inside each. Between each pod are fibers that need to be pulled away. (The pod is the edible part of the fruit.) Once the center is cut away, you can bend the section out so that the pods pull away from one another and the fibers break off. Then comes the tedious task of pulling out the pods, stripping away the fibers and trying desperately to create a bowl full of pods for everyone to enjoy, instead of eating the pod as soon as it is cleaned!

Jack Fruit is sticky, sweet, and so so yummy! It has the sweetness similar to a pineapple, but not the same taste. The texture is unlike any fruit I have ever had, and it seems odd to call it a fruit because it is so dense and fiber-y.

The Jack Fruit season just started and we are starting to see it in the baskets of the street vendors. So far, it runs $50,000 dobras (2 Euros) for a bag of prepared pods, which is pretty big and holds a lot of pods, and $30,000 dobras for half a fruit, unprepared.

Click here for pictures of Jack Fruit.