I have been meaning to give this stuff a try for a long time. I’ve had a few pieces of freeze-dried jackfruit before that were quite tasty, so the fresh stuff had to be good too, right?

RIGHT! In fact it may be my new favorite fruit.

But before I go into what makes jackfruit so awesome, let me tell you a bit about what is not awesome…getting the fruit out of the husk. Jackfruit grows in prickly green pods that can grow to be enormous, like as big as a 5 year-old child enormous. Luckily, my farmer’s market sells jackfruit pre-cut into manageable sizes, so I was able to pick up this half piece that was about the size of a football.

You can see that the actual fruit is the darker yellow lobes encasing the seeds, the rest is a kind of fiberous pith that is edible but less delicious, and there’s a giant inedible core much like that of a pineapple.

I figured it’d be no big deal to pluck the lobes of fruit out of the husk since they’re somewhat dry and firm. Nope. I spent almost an entire hour hacking this thing to pieces to get at all that goodness. It was a massacre, and half way through it I was sure that no matter how good this fruit was it couldn’t be worth the pain of wrestling it out of a sticky, prickly football for an hour.

And my hands were covered in some sticky sap-like stuff that would not come off.

All for about this much fruit…

But oh did it turn out to be worth it!

This is a bizarre fruit to describe. The flesh is somewhat starchy and fiberous, but flexible. It feels dry to the touch and has only a faint sweet smell and practically no flavor as you place it in your mouth. Biting down feels like chomping into a slice of orange peel, and a similar fine spray of zesty oil hits your palate but without a trace of the bitterness of citrus zest.

The flavor explodes as you bite through and it tastes juicy although no juice comes out. It reminded me a bit of pineapple, but without that prickly enzymey tartness that pineapple has. Some say it’s similar to an under ripe banana and I can kind of see that, but really it’s a flavor unlike any other.

Every time a took a bite I was so surprised that such a candied sweetness could come from such a hard and juiceless piece of fruit. It really is new and exciting with every bite.

Have you ever tried jackfruit?

July 8, 2011 Alayna Discussion, Taste Test 9 comments

Sorry I’ve been away for a while. I discovered on Tuesday that all the pictures I’d taken over the 4th of July weekend were gone due to a faulty memory card. In truth, we didn’t do anything exciting for the 4th anyway since the Decatur fireworks were washed out with rain, so I didn’t have much to show you anyhow.

I did manage to do one constructive thing this week though…build a photography lightbox!

Jeff did some research for me on how to build one and we set out to procure the materials. Apparently, all you need is some white foam board, 2 utility lamps, and some bright lightbulbs. Oh, and tape, lots of tape.

We put in a couple of daylight CFLs and got to work testing it out.

Wow, it is bright all lit up! I almost need to wear sunglasses to take pictures in it.

I practiced taking pictures of many different objects and playing with my camera settings to see what worked.

I still need to purchase some cloth backdrops to hang inside so that I can completely eliminate the background in the photos, but overall I like the effect.

The lightbox was needed for a super secret project I’m working on that I’ll tell you all about when the time comes. 😉

Ever used a lightbox?

July 7, 2011 Alayna Discussion 4 comments

Let me start by saying that I am not on a diet and I do not normally purchase “diet products.” I bought this think Thin bar solely because I flipped out that it was chocolate covered strawberry flavored. Sounded delicious to me, so I ignored the capitalized “Thin” and the various other blurbs about how now you can have your dessert and eat it too and other marketing bullet points that alluded to real pleasure suppression as the avenue to weight loss.

:::Steps off soap box:::

If I’d have seen this ingredient list before I tossed it in my shopping basket I would have probably put it back on the shelf. Very little real food in there. There are 0 grams of sugar and 15 grams of protein and the bar clocks in a 200 calories. Those are pretty good stats…as long as it tastes good. (I think you know where this is going.)

Appearance: A nice size. Covered in a chocolate coating that appears a bit waxy and fake but nothing too alarming.

Texture: Soft, pasty, and homogenous. Reminds me a bit of marzipan with the smooth but subtle grittiness.

Taste: Oh. My. GAD. GROSS!! This is the single worst bar I’ve ever tasted so far in my life. It’s like a giant squishy metallic-tasting vitamin paste covered in colored beeswax. But what about the strawberry flavor, you ask? Nearly non-existant. It tastes a bit like if they took that thick gluey strawberry glaze you get on top of diner cheesecakes, mixed it with cherry cough syrup, diluted and aerosolized it, and then misted it around the room that the bars were made in. Faint but distinctly gross.

Overall, the one word I would have to use to describe this bar is OFFENSIVE. Not just offensive in flavor, but I am genuinely offended that anyone would have the gall to market this a satisfying and healthy dessert replacement. At 200 calories, you could probably eat 2 or even 3 real chocolate covered strawberries and be putting healthier things in your body than this fake crap. It saddens me to imagine that some poor woman might choke down this awful concoction in lieu of a real dessert because she thinks this is all she can have.

This bar was pretty cheap and I still feel like I got ripped off.

July 1, 2011 Alayna Discussion 6 comments