Now, I’ll start off by saying that I generally like meat substitutes, even if they don’t taste much like meat. I’m not vegetarian (though close to it: flexitarian, you might say) so I like meat, too, and I am familiar with what it tastes like.
I was at TJ’s yesterday looking for something to bring to a veggie potluck for a friend’s birthday and saw unpromising looking cans in the new products section labeled “Green Jackfruit in brine.” Unpromising as it looked, it was something I wasn’t familiar with, so I took a look. The description claimed that unripe jackfruit when cooked has a taste and texture similar to pulled meat and can be used as a meat substitute in almost any dish. Well, now. That sounded terrible, not to mention unlikely. But I figured no one else would be bringing jackfruit BBQ to the potluck, so I grabbed a couple of cans of it, some sriracha-garlic BBQ sauce, and some soy milk ice cream as my “real” contribution.
We forgot about the ice cream by the time for dessert, but the jackfruit BBQ was a big hit. All I did was chop and mash it up a bit, heat it with some oil and then sautée it with the BBQ sauce for a bit. Admittedly, BBQ sauce will make anything taste pretty good, but I’ve had professionally cooked vegan “BBQ” that was neither nearly as good nor nearly as meaty-tasting as this. I’m eager to try it with different sauces, like green curry, which a Filipino friend recommended on Facebook, and my cousin sent me a fairly elaborate recipe for jack stew that involves soaking the jackfruit in wine. He said he served it at a catering function recently and overheard a customer say, “I didn’t get the veggie thing, I had the stew.”
Amazingly it has no protein, and very few calories. If you like non-meat alternatives, I HIGHLY recommend you find a Trader Joe’s and get some before they discontinue it, as they inevitably do with everything really good.