Vegan BBQ Pulled Pork

My adventure with jackfruit started a few years ago in Jamaica. I ate it but didn’t pay too much attention to it.

A year ago, I found a sliced jackfruit in one of the local stores in Chicago and I decided to experiment with it. So I brought home this warm yellow slice of jackfruit and left it in my refrigerator for about a week. I found a good curry jackfruit recipe. When I was pealing it, it was pretty sticky so I was using gloves. Overal experience was not that pleasant and my curry jackfruit didn’t taste well. It was a bit too sweet for me. I was not impressed.

I changed my mind and opinion about jackfruit when I tried it as the vegan version of pulled pork at the  Summer Vegan Fest. It was delicious. I was ready to experiment more to reconstruct this wonderful recipe.

What is exactly a jackfruit?

A jackfruit is a fruit native to South and Southeast Asia. It’s got a distinctive, musky smell, and a flavor that some describe as like Juicy Fruit gum. It is the largest tree fruit in the world, capable of reaching 100 pounds.

This tropical fruit is a great energy booster. Moreover, it is loaded with essential minerals (potassium, magnesium, manganese, and iron), vitamins (A, B and C), dietary fiber and antioxidants which collectively contribute to keeping your heart healthy, maintain blood pressure and help you beat the heat.

When you go to the store to buy it, you are buying a cut piece of it, not the whole fruit. Its color is yellow and what I have learned, later on, you really want to buy a pale yellow versus vibrant yellow color. The vibrant yellow jackfruit is ripe and doesn’t have the stringy texture which you want for this recipe. It is also pretty sweet like mango.

What you will need for this recipe is 5 lbs of unripe fresh jackfruit. It is usually a very pale yellow color and you will get a piece of jackfruit with skin and seeds.

Remove the skin and outer 1/2 inch of jackfruit as well as the inner part of the fruit. What you need is the stringy fleshy part around seeds.

VEGAN BBQ PULLED PORK

INGREDIENTS:

• 5 lbs fresh unripe jackfruit
• 1 tsp of olive oil
• 1 onion
• 3 clove of garlic
• 1 jalapeno pepper
• 1 tsp of brown sugar
• 1 tsp of ground cumin
• 1 tsp of ground coriander
• 1 tsp of chili powder
• 1 tsp of smoked chili flakes
• 1 tsp of paprika
• 1 tsp of smoked salt
• 1/2 tsp of ground pepper
• 2 cups of vegetable broth
• 1/2 cup of vegan bbq sauce

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. cut the jackfruit and remove all the stringy parts that are around the seeds. That would be the main part of a fruit we are going to use. Throw away the rest.
2. chop the onion and saute it in the olive oil over the medium heat in a covered pan for about 7 minutes until it gets translucent
3. add the chopped garlic and jalapeno pepper and saute longer.
4. add sugar and spices and stir mixing them well
5. add jackfruit and vegetable broth, still use the cover and simmer for 30 minutes.
6. preheat the oven to 400 degrees
7. after 30 minutes transfer jackfruit to the baking tray with foil. Leave all the extra liquid in the pan if any.
8. spread on the baking sheet and bake for 20 minutes
9. remove from the oven, add the bbq sauce and more liquid if needed
10. bake for another 15 minutes

Serve on the bun or the potato. I am gluten free so I served my “pulled pork” on the baked potato. It was delicious!