Jack Fruit Season is IN

And I for one am excited about it. I was riding into work the other day and was a touch hungry, saw a street side fruit seller and decided to stop because he had cut up some of his fruit in fancy ways. As I got closer I noticed it was jackfruit! Score! I had seen jackfruit down in Sri Lanka and wondered why I hadn't seen it in Chennai. They are both WELL into the tropics and only a few hundred miles separate the two. What's the difference. I guessed maybe pollution, but somehow India manages to get around this problem of letting pollution spoil anything. So thick you can't see the sun... Not yet, ok keep working...

Anyway, I bought me some jackfruit. It is very delicious. For those friends of mine who dislike bananas, perhaps you might have a softer introduction with jackfruit. I had eaten it in America, but it is much blander there. Here, when fresh it has a mildly pungent aroma, not too dissimilar from the infamous durian, but not THAT kind of pungent. The kind of pungent that after you eat it, you'll smell it on your hands for a while. The lingering smell has the faintest sulfurous notes... (that kind of pungent). Otherwise it's really a cross between a banana and a pineapple but softer than either.

I do have an amusing anecdote about it though. At lunch, the last few pieces of jackfruit hadn't yet been eaten so I offered a little to my colleagues. One of them is a graduate student from Tamil Nadu, and he "explained" to me that jackfruit is a tropical fruit and therefore doesn't grow in the winter... WTF!? Winter!? If we just had "winter" then I'm going to struggling mightily in another month or two just to stay alive. It seems quite strange that a tropical fruit won't grow when the lowest temperature outside is about 80F...

Well, either way, I guess that means a long summer season and I anticipate stopping by fruit sellers all "summer" to buy me some fresh papaya and jackfruit. Mangoes are coming soon I'm told.