Work in progress.....

 Here's a  breadfruit  bowl that  we're working on at the moment. It 's not quite finished, but I think it already looks quite nice.

Maiore - part 2, cooking breadfruit

Here are some ideas for those of you interested in cooking with breadfruit:

The simplest and one of the best methods is to cook it over a camp-fire or BBQ, it gives it great flavor - otherwise cooking on the gas burner works well too:
Take one ripe breadfruit, they're usually best kept a day at least after picking, they develop more flavor that way. It should give slightly when you squeeze it, but not be soft to the touch.

When the breadfruit is well charred all over (about 20-30 minutes), then remove the skin with a sharpened stick, wrap it in a cloth or some leaves and beat it lightly with a stick to soften it up, then just eat it in chunks in place of bread or taro.

Tahitians like to eat this with tinned corned beef, that has been cooked over the heat with some tomato sauce (not ketchup) with onion and garlic, then doused in mitihue (a sauce made of the fermented pulp of young coconuts). It's super greasy and salty, but the taste and texture combination is excellent. If tinned corned beef doesn't sound so appetizing to you then bolognese works as a good substitue, particularly if you add a few lardons at the beginning.

Here are a few slightly more exotic ideas:
Breadfruit soup
This is a recipe based on a Caribbean version of vichyssoise, but we don't always have leeks here, so I often just use onion and I like to eat it hot with a pinch of chipotle pepper or paprika to give it a kick.

Ingredients:
1/4 breadfruit peeled cored and coarsely chopped up
2 tbsp butter
2 onions, diced
3 cloves of garlic crushed
1l chicken stock
salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste
500ml milk or half-cream

Fry onions and garlic in the butter over a low heat, for about 5 minutes until soft and translucent, add the stock and breadfruit, bring to the boil and simmer for about 20 mins, until the breadfruit is soft. Blend soup and add the milk and seasonings, to taste. Serve with a swirl of cream and sprinkle with finely chopped green onions or chives.

Breadfruit fritters (Jeegujje Podi)
Breadfruit makes for great fries, just substituting breadfruit for potato. Here is a slightly more complicated but delicious recipe adapted from a traditional dish from southern India.

Ingredients:
¼ firm Breadfruit
1 cup Plain flour
2 tbsp Corn Flour
1 tsp Cumin
1 tsp Paprika
1 tsp whole Mustard seed
pinch of Fenugreek
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup milk

Peel the bread fruit and remove the core and seeds. Slice the breadfruit into about 5mm thick slices and put them in water untill required. Sift the flour and other dry ingredients together, mix with the milk to make a thick paste. Dip dried breadfruit slices in a little bit of cornflour then turn in the batter and deep fry for 5 minutes, until golden brown. Drain on a paper towel and eat while still warm with a homemade chutney or ketchup!

Breadfruit jam

Ingredients:

1 breadfruit
500g brown sugar
1 lime juiced
1/2 vanilla pod

Boil the breadfruit in water for 10 minutes, then drain and put in a pan with all the other ingredients, add 1 cup of water and cook slowly for about 30 mins, it will get very thick and you may need to add a little more water to keep it from sticking at the bottom.
This is a recipe I found surfing the net, I just tried it out yesterday, and frankly the jury is still out on this idea - breadfruit is a bit like pumpkin, it has such a subtle flavour that if you're going to make jam with it you need to load it with spices, or it just tastes sugary. Maybe cardamon and cinnamon would be good. You could try using a very ripe breadfruit, or it might even benefit from being mixed with something else, it makes a super thick gluey paste so maybe it could be mixed with banana or even coconut (milk/grated) to make it a bit more interesting......

Maiore - part 1, the breadfruit

We live in a district of Rurutu called Vitaria, unlike the rest of the island, which depends on taro as its staple, the inhabitants of Vitaria were known as breadfruit-eaters. This is because we have no reliable fresh water-source on this side of this island, so we couldn't have grown our own taro, even if we wanted to.

Our poor breadfruit tree growing in the shade of our coconuts,
but still determinedly giving fruit

Now is the start of the breadfruit season and our tree has a good load of fruit. A breadfruit tree can grow to a height of 20 meters and is one of the highest-yielding food plants, a single tree can produce over 200 fruits per season. The fruits are very rich in starch, they are also a source of vitamin C, potassium, zinc and thiamin. We normally eat our breadfruit cooked in its skin over a fire or directly on the stove burner, but it can also be boiled, baked in the oven, deep-fried or cooked slowly in the Tahitian oven. When cooked the taste is potato-like, or similar to fresh baked bread (hence the name).

The Rurutu name for the tree is maiore, but is better known as 'uru in Tahitian. The plant originates from the Malay Peninsula and western Pacific, where it is pollinated by fruit bats. There are no fruit-bats here in the eastern Pacific and it is thought that the plant was transported throughout the Polynesian triangle on voyaging canoes. The fruit remains a very important food source in the Marquesas and also Tahiti. The Marquesans developed a method for storing the ripe fruit for up to a year, trampling and fermenting the fruit in large holes in ground, providing a reliable food supply, even in times of scarcity.

breadfruit (unripe), showing leaf bud and leaves

The breadfruit tree has many uses other than food. There are well over thirty distinct varieties documented from French Polynesia alone, each favored for different qualities. Breadfruit produces a pale lightweight timber that was widely used across the Pacific for building structures, furniture, outrigger canoes and even surfboards, a sport which first originated in Tahiti. The bark of the breadfruit tree is used to make a fine cream-coloured bark-cloth or tapa. All parts of the plant yield latex, a sticky milky sap. This sap can be applied to the skin as a moisturizer, or to heal cuts, scratches and various skin diseases, it was also mixed with monoi (perfumed coconut oil) to make a kind of Polynesian hair gel. The sap was used as glue and caulking material for canoes. The thick and abrasive leaves are used to wrap food and can also be topically applied to soothe muscle aches. The leaf buds are prepared in diverse ways as a cure for a wide variety of ailments ranging from angina, to bronchitis, asthma and internal haemorrhaging. Burning the fallen, sun-dried male flowers is also an effective nontoxic mosquito repellent.

A contemporary use for breadfruit - leaf-print blocks, I love printing with
these leaves,which have also inspired traditional Hawaiian quilting patterns

Forster, the botanist on Captain Cook’s second voyage to Tahiti in 1776, was the first European to describe the plant in any detail. The high productivity and nutritional value of the plant made it a candidate as a cheap food source for slaves in the West Indies. Lieutenant William Bligh was assigned by the British Admiralty to captain the HMS Bounty on a voyage to Tahiti to collect breadfruit saplings and take them to the British Antilles. The famous voyage never completed its objective, as a result of the now fabled mutiny, though Captain Bligh’s second expedition did successfully deliver over 2,000 young trees to Jamaica in 1793. Breadfruit grows in the Caribbean still, though the species never thrived to the same extent as it does in the Pacific and it never really became a favored food-source.

According to Tahitian legend, the breadfruit originated from the ultimate sacrifice of a chief from Rai’atea, Ruata’ata. The island was seized by famine, Ruata’ata and his wife Rumauari’i had nothing to feed their four children but the bare red soil beneath their feet, in desperation they went off into the forest to search for something to eat, all they could find were some ferns in a cave. Ruata’ata despaired, he could no longer bear to watch his children suffer. He told his wife to go to sleep there in the cave and that tomorrow he could deliver them all from starvation, but that he would have to leave them, to do so. In the morning Ruamauari’i woke in the dappled shade of a great tree that had grown at the entrance of the cave during the night, the tree was laden with heavy breadfruits that the family gratefully ate, saved from starvation. Ruata’ata never returned and his wife understood that he had transformed himself into the lofty breadfruit tree, the leaves and branches represent his arms, the trunk his body and the fruit his head.