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This is John Kohler with okraw.om. I have a very special treat for you today. I'm actually
travelling. I'm in Las Vegas and one of the questions I get a lot is, 'John, how do you
eat when you travel?' Well, when I travel, I try to eat just like I was at home. I eat
a diet rich in fresh fruits and fresh vegetables. So, here in Las Vegas, I have the advantage
of several cool Asian markets, and I don't have that back home, and look what I found.
I found this cool jackfruit. So, the jackfruit is probably the world's largest tree fruit.
These can get up to be like 50 pounds. This fruit right here is actually about 20 pounds.
It was about $1 a pound, so this thing cost me $20. So, this is a $20 fruit right here,
and we're going to cut that open and shoe you how to eat it, basically. So, the first
thing when you're picking out a jackfruit to, you know, pick out and buy, you want to
try to get one that's really ripe, because most of the times, you know, some people and
some cultures actually buy the jackfruit not for the fruit itself, but for the seeds. They'll
actually roast and boil and, you know, the seeds, and eat those salted. So, the seeds
can be edible, but I like to buy the jackfruit for the fruit itself and they are so delicious.
So, the best way to find a ripe jackfruit is to be underweight a jackfruit tree and,
you know, let it fall off the tree, but watch out when it falls 'cause if a 50 pound or
even a 20 pound fruit hits you from way tall above, it's going to hurt, and I don't recommend
it. So, other ways to check are sometimes I like to go by the color. If I have a whole
bin of jackfruit, I'll look and I'll try to pick the one that's the most yellowish golden
color versus the greenish color. Another really good way is use your 2 nose nostrils. Use
your sniffer and sniff it. It should smell just really sweet and really good. If it has
no smell it might not be ripe. The other thing, you want to check the pressure. It should
yield to general pressure, and you want to look for black moldy spots. Some of the stores
I went to had jackfruit where you could just push your finger in and it was just totally
go in. So, that's not too good, either. So, this is the best one I could find. Without
further ado, let's cut it open. So, this is a 20-pound. We're going to cut this in half.
It'll be about 10 pounds at that point. We got to have a nice knife. Make sure it's really
sharp. Many time I like to use a serrated knife. So, I'm just going to take this, and
this is one big fruit, man. I'm just like, cutting this fruit in half. It's kind of funny,
cutting a fruit this big in half. It's rare that I get to cut something this big. Alright,
so, here it is, a cut open jackfruit. Alright, I did pretty good. So, when you cut open the
jackfruit, this is what it looks like, and inside here, this is like the core. This is
not really edible. The part that you wan tot eat on a jackfruit is right here. There's
these little seed pods, and these are the seeds. There it goes. The seed pods come out
and some peoples basically either boil or fry these and salt them up or eat them like
nuts, which you can do, but we want to eat this fruit. So, I got a really nice ripe one.
This is orange in color. We're going to carefully cut out these little section that surround
the seed, and that is the edible part of the jackfruit and it's so, so good. So, normally
how I get these out is I'll use my knife, and I'll cut around the edge on the bottom
edge, and then along the top, and then a little section will come out, and you might notice
there'll be these other sections that come out, too, with it. While these are edible,
they don't taste very good. So, I recommend just, you know, discarding that section, and
then you're going to remove the seed and then you can eat the rest of the fruit there. This
is a good jackfruit. The other thing you'll notice, and you kind of white these things
are sticking to me, and on my knife here, I got all this white gooey stuff that's stuck
to my knife blade. This is latex. This is naturally occurring in the jackfruit, and
this is fine. Very hard to clean, so the other question is, 'John, how do I clean the latex?'
Well, you could use soap and water all day long and guess what? This stuff will not get
removed. You're going to have to use another great solvent. Coconut oil, or actually any
other kind of oil will work. It'll basically dissolve the latex to get it off. So, rub
your hands with coconut oil before you start to eat the jackfruit so that you can clean
yourself up later on and you won't have all kinds of latex stuck to you. It's also good
for cleaning your knives and other utensils, too. So, I'm sitting her enjoying my jackfruit
and I'm just basically cutting out piece by piece with my knife until I got out to this
point. So, I got all the main pieces out. Now what you're going to do is take out the
core of the jackfruit. So, I like to take out this core, 'cause all the jackfruit pieces
that you eat are actually attached to the core, but before I take out the core and show
you how to do that and review all the jackfruit, it's going to look real cool, I'd like to
tall you more about the jackfruit so you know, 'hey, John, how does it taste?' Well, the
jackfruit, it tastes just like juicyfruit gum. So, if you've had juicyfruit gum, that's
the flavor of jackfruit, 'cause juicyfruit got their flavor form jackfruit. So, jackfruit
is the original juicyfruit gum. It's actually kind of chewy a little bit, but that being
said, I have gotten jackfruits that are more hard and crunchy, and then there's varieties
that are more chewy, but in the most part, I like to chewy kind better. Sometimes if
they're hard and crunchy, they're actually not completely ripe. So, the flavor intensifies,
with any fruit as well as the jackfruit, when the fruit is completely ripe. So, I encourage
you to get as ripe as possible. I've had other jackfruits that are hard and crunchy and really
don't taste good, and it wasn't ripe because not all the time will they sell you ripe fruits.
Sometimes they sell you unripe fruit, and actually the time I got unripe fruit was actually
in Hawaii. Jackfruit is actually a tropical tree, so it grows in the tropics in Hawaii
in the United States and other tropical locations. These seeds are viable. Actually, we'll save
these seeds, dump them in a pot with a whole bunch of soil and just let them be the water
every once in a while, and I started getting jackfruit plants. Now, I'm living in Southern
California, so the plants would grow. Maybe they'd be a nice indoor container plant, but,
you know what? These trees get to be really, really tall, and, so, it's probably never
going to produce fruit in California, although its fun as a curiosity. So, once you mostly
eat all the fruit out, then you're going to take your knife and gently cut a slit down
here, and I like to do it at a little bit of an angle, not too much of an angle. Let's
see how good I am today. You cut too much, you're going to cut too much of the fruit
off. So, there you go. This is the center core on the jackfruit. It's actually attached
to this core. This is the core it grows off of. So, you've taken that out and you can
cut off all the little orange pieces. Also, I'd like to say that jackfruit can come in
an orange or yellow color. I particularly like the orange color a little bit better.
Once you get that off, you can basically see the rest of the fruit and we can do this.
This is really cool. You can take the fruit like this and you can see al the different
pods, and there's some seeds dropping out but all the different pods or the different
things you eat, you could literally reach in here, grab one thing of fruit out, and
then here we can pop out the seed in the middle. Look at that. It just pops right out, and
this is the delicious part that you eat. I love jackfruit so much. I'm going to get back
to eating and let's see if I'm going to finish this other half of the jackfruit off. I encourage
everybody to eat their fruits fresh. So, eat fresh jackfruit, but if you do have extra,
or you can't find jackfruit, many times in Asian markets they have frozen jackfruits.
So, they'll be the pods that are seeded and they'll be frozen. So, what I like to do with
the frozen jackfruit is blend them into smoothies, like a banana, jackfruit, coconut smoothie,
so good, or you can take the frozen jackfruit and run it through the champion juicer or
a juicer with a homogenizing or blank plate to make jackfruit ice cream or more appropriately
jackfruit sorbet. I got to back to eating. My mouth is watering. So, I'm just about finished
eating my jackfruit, and you can se here's a jackfruit carcass left and it's all flat
now. It's kind of cool and we're going to go ahead and take out this last pod out of
there and they kind of just stick in there like that. You just kind of come in and pull
it out. One whole jackfruit pod, like to break it open and then basically just pull out the
seed, and there's the seed. Here's the fruit. So good. Eating jackfruit, it's a really sensuous
experience, and I don't mean like in the *** sense, I just mean your sensations are totally
come alive 'cause the smell, it just smells fresh and fruity, like juicyfruit gum. It
smells so good, and I mean, just look at this thing, I mean, look at this carcass. I mean,
look at the back. It's just crazy. Some people would say, 'oh, John, is that a durian?' no,
this is a jackfruit. It's way different than a durian. This has a nice pleasant aroma,
although some people would say that durians has a pleasant aroma, and I do agree. Some
people don't think durians smell good but I haven't really met anybody that doesn't
think jackfruit doesn't smell good. The other thing, jackfruit is a lot larger than durians.
So, this one was 20 pounds. They can be up to, you know, 50 pounds. The spikes on the
jackfruit aren't that sharp. So, on the durian, they're much, much sharper, and these aren't
that sharp, and jackfruit is one of my top 5 favorite fruits in the whole wide world.
I guess I'm really lucky, getting to eat it today. So, my jackfruit that I bought, once
again, was 20 pounds. It was on sale for 99 cents a pound. So, it was about $20, roughly,
and this is my first meal of the day today. I don't want to say 10 pounds of jackfruit
'cause the shell weighs a whole bunch, and the fruit doesn't weight a whole lot and there's
the seed in there, too, but definitely a nice-sized, filling, raw food meal. So, if you have extra
jackfruit, what do you do with it? Well, jackfruit, from my experience, will store pretty good
for one or 2 days. After 2 days it really starts to get kind of funky. So, you probably,
at that point, would want to freeze it. You can dehydrate it, but, in my experience, defiantly
frozen jackfruit that you use in a smoothie is a lot better than a dehydrated jackfruit.
It just kind of loses some of that fun and that taste, you know. So, anyways, this is
John Kohler with okraw.com. Going to get back to finishing my last piece of jackfruit. We'll
see you next time, and keep eating your fruit. It's good for you.