Breadfruit is pretty amazing. Considered a potential answer to famine in the Pacific, one breadfruit tree can provide as much as 400 pounds of food in a year. Packing lots of carbs, this energy-filled fruit is definitely big enough to feed hungry mouths... plus, the tree also produces latex, which worked out really well for the seafaring Pacific Islanders who needed sticky substances to seal their canoes.
The crazy thing about breadfruit is that it bears no seeds. Nope, once breadfruit became renowned for the amount of food it could produce, people basically propagated it to produce the highest possible fruit to seed ratio - meaning, they continually nurtured the trees that produced fruits with the fewest seeds until finally there were fruits with no seeds at all. So, you have to harvest the tiny sprouts from the roots of the mature trees, which are very fragile, to propagate the plant. The plant is less popular in Hawaii than in the rest of the Pacific, though breadfruit is sometimes used as a taro substitute in making poi.
Here is a pretty good shot of what the cooked insides look like. You can see it's a weird texture, and each of the little holes is kind of like an ex-seed pod so it splits up really easily after you've cooked it. The texture is a bit like a baked potato, except crumblier.
The coolest thing about breadfruit is how versatile it is. Most people say it tastes like a potato or bread (hence the name) and thus they eat it in savory dishes. You can make it into fries, you can bake it, you can put it in curries or sauces. BUT, you can also make it sweet. Our hosts Libby and James have described eating it like French toast. And, feeling experimental, we processed it with macadamia nuts and added a bit of oil and egg to make it into a great pie crust for pumpkin pie.
Delicious!
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