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In 2008 I went to the vegan restaurant Horizons, the late project of Rich Landau (of V Street and Vedge fame), and had jackfruit for the first time in my life. It blew my mind-- vegetarian cooking has come a long way in the past decade but at the time I could not believe that the juicy, firm texture of the stuff wasn't meat. After three years of tofu and black bean burgers it was a revelation. Since then I've been let down by any number of pre-packaged and pre-seasoned jackfruit products, so when I saw a big pyramid of plain canned jackfruit at my local Trader Joe's, I was happy to buy it but have spent the past few weeks just looking at it and putting off using it in anything. Tonight, rained in and without any huge desire to put on a whole production for dinner, I decided hey, jackfruit is as much like chicken as it is like pork. Let's grab destiny by the horns and make a bbq jackfruit chickencheese. Nothing fancy or especially photogenic but it was a quick, tasty dinner that gave me the opportunity to work with a new ingredient.  Here it is straight out of the can and drained. At this point it definitely has an uncooked-chicken type of color, but it's definitely visually legible as fruit, and has a nice, mild tropical flavor.  After just a little bit of shredding it's already beginning to look "meatier."  Next I just got some garlic sauteeing.  While that was going on I decided I wanted to give at least a perfunctory nod to the chickencheese's roots and get some pepper ready. All I had around was a little pile of farmer's market peppers-- a habanero, a little cute purple thing, and a mild little red guy. I just left them in long skinny strips because for some reason that screams "sandwich" to my gnarled little Tristate brain.  I threw the jackfruit in and let it cook for five minutes or so, by the end of which it definitely scans convincingly as chicken. I left some of the core (?) pieces unshredded because I was curious about their texture. They were fine, all things told, but next time I'm going to shred all of them up too.  Then it was time for sauce. I'd planned on using some of a batch of Terry Bryant's barbecue sauce that I'd made awhile ago but oops, I forgot I used it all. So this is a bit of bottled bbq sauce, some sriracha, and a little splash of Benito's white hot sauce which is very heavy on ginger and lime. I covered it and let it cook down for about 20 minutes.  While that was going on I put some slaw together. The recipe for this slaw is that I went to Trader Joe's and paid for it. I also chopped up another pepper to get rid of them and tossed that in.  At this point I would have been satisfied, but this is already barely chicken so I felt obligated to include some cheese. For me I grated some ghost pepper cheddar I had around. It's a gimmicky cheese but I like it a lot-- sort of hot but it mostly just has that deep kind of fruity smokiness of ghost pepper without the heat getting bossy. My wife is less into spicy stuff so for her, just some sharp cheddar.  Then it was done! The jackfruit had soaked up the sauce nicely and the rest had gotten down to a nice rich consistency. It doesn't look pretty but it tasted great and scratched that "pulled meat" itch sufficiently well. Here and there I still got a hint of the fruit's tropical flavor, which I didn't mind it all. It was like having a little tiny note of pineapple in the background. I also made some (slightly undercooked) fries and just dumped some paprika and cheese on them.  And here's King Francis, staring in shock that he didn't get any of it. I liked it, my wife liked it, it took like half an hour, and was super cheap. It has me really excited to play around with jackfruit some more. If I decide to do it again, I think it would benefit from some seitan bacon, and I wish I'd remembered that I made some nice spicy pickles awhile ago that are just sitting in the fridge and would have been perfect here. I also think a buffalo jackfruit sandwich would be a very satisfying no-brainer. Call it a chickencheese or a base impostor but I'll stand by it! How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Jan 26, 2020 |
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Jan 26, 2020 01:23
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 09:38 |
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I would love a chickencheese tag!
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Jan 29, 2020 05:28
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Jan 29, 2020 21:57
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I ate that chicken cheese and it was magnificent.
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Jan 31, 2020 01:29
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