Comments (0)

By pigwhisperer, March 21, 2010

It’s jaca season again. Yum. There is nothing like opening a ripe jaca (or jackfruit as it’s called in English) and eating the meaty yellow bulbs surrounding its seeds. They are delicious: sweet, a little tangy (their acid leaves a tingling sensation in your mouth), and really fragrant. If a jaca is really ripe, then it’s much TOO fragrant for some, smelling a little like rotten fruit.

Jacas came to Brazil from India. I suppose the Portuguese brought them and they’ve been around ever since. We have thousands of trees on the farm. The jaca is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world. They can apparently reach 80 pounds in weight and up to 36 inches long and 20 inches in diameter. The fruit’s skin is prickly and has a really sticky, milky sap when cut open. If the sap gets on your hands (and it usually does if you’re eating the fruit) you can’t just wash it off, but must use oil (olive oil, canola, etc.) to rub it off.

There are two kinds of jaca trees here: dura (hard) and mole (soft). A jaca dura tree produces fruit whose pulp is, you guessed it, harder than the mole’s pulp. It is impossible to tell just by looking at a tree which kind it is. I’ve tried and tried. You basically have to eat the fruit off the tree to know. There are great debates here (no, really, there are) about which kind of jaca is best–mole or dura. Mole is sweeter but has to be consumed right away. Dura lasts longer, and can be made into jam. I guess if you’re a die-hard mole lover, you subscribe to the “live in the moment” philosophy of life. While dura lovers like to take their time, enjoy things slowly, make things last as long as they can. I’m like our pigs–I like jacas any way I can get them.

Here’s a nice article about the jackfruit.