Paul Andrew on Jakfruit

Paul Andrew, the Secretary for the Mackay Branch of Rare Fruit Australia describes his personal experiences with Jakfruit and explains how he has overcome the problems with this fruit.

They grow easily for me ( no TLC ) even the seeds sprout easily in the scrap heap which I empty at the base of trees.

My Favourite Variety
I have fruited one called “ AMBER “ ( from Bruno in Ingham) last year 2 fruits, this year 2 fruits (and a small one). They are very crisp, very sweet with orange coloured flesh and have very little latex. The only downside is that the flesh is very hard to remove. As I haven’t had many fruits to experiment with, this may be overcome with time.

But my all time favourite variety has to be “ HONEY GOLD “ with crisp, sweet, yellow flesh.

Dried Jakfruit
In the early days I tried to dry it and it used to stick to the trays, and then I couldn’t remove it and I’d get frustrated so I wouldn’t do it. In the last few years I started tasting dried jakfruit that other people had done and I was hooked. So I asked a lot of questions.

The three things that help me are
(1) oil the trays first
(2) place the fruit shiny side down and
(3) turn over after the first 2 or 3 hours.

I had a variety called “ GALAXY “ big fruit, heavy bearer, sweet crisp yellow flesh but a lot of latex (more than normal). One year it flowered at ground level below the graft and made a fruit that was round (galaxy was oblong about 500ml long) with mildly sweet pale yellow very crisp flesh and no latex. I enjoyed this so I cut the tree off below the graft as I hoped it might bear the round fruit. Next time it fruited it was different again. If the new fruit are picked before they go soft on the tree, the flesh is a little bit crisp, yellow, sweet with like a lemon tang.

However if they are left to go soft the flesh goes very sloppy almost to the point that it is almost impossible to handle it. What I do then is to freeze it until I have a lot, then I thaw it out and put it in the blender to make leather. However when you blend Jakfruit it is very thick and sticky, so to overcome this I mix other fruits like mango & passionfruit with it to thin it out. The last time I made jakfruit leather I mixed green and purple seedless grapes with it.

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