Taking Precautions Against Sap
Cover your counter with plastic wrap. Cutting open jackfruit is a messy process and a layer of plastic wrap will make your clean up a lot easier. Start by clearing your counter of everything to give yourself a large workspace. Then stretch plastic wrap over the space where you’ll be cutting the jackfruit. Cover an area around 3 feet (0.91 m) in width.
Shield your hands from the jackfruit’s sap with latex gloves. If your jackfruit is not quite ripe, it will be full of sap that is incredibly sticky. If you don’t wear gloves, it will be difficult to get the sap off your hands. If you don’t have gloves, you can also coat your hands with about a ⁄2 tablespoon (7.4 mL) of grapeseed oil or another type of cooking oil. You can use grapeseed oil, olive oil, sesame oil, or coconut oil. If you get sap on your hands or any other surface, just rub some oil onto the area as you would if you were cleaning with soap.
Coat the surface of a large, sharp knife in grapeseed oil. This step will help prevent any sap from sticking to your knife. Because of the jackfruit’s size, the best type of knife to use is a Chinese chef’s knife or a knife of similar size. Pour a small dollop of grapeseed oil, or any other type of cooking oil you have on hand, onto your knife, and use your fingers to spread the oil evenly over the knife’s entire surface. Spread the oil on the knife’s surface slowly and carefully, so that you don’t accidentally cut yourself. The oil may make the knife slippery, so be careful. Jackfruit sap can ruin a knife, so don’t use a high-quality knife to cut the fruit open.
Opening the Jackfruit
Cut a 1 ⁄2–2 in (3.8–5.1 cm) wide segment off the end of the jackfruit. To start, place the jackfruit on a large cutting board, and keep it stable with one hand. Then, grab the oiled-up knife with your other hand. Stick the tip of the knife into the top of the jackfruit, and cut around its surface. Alternatively, you can cut the jackfruit in half vertically, and then separate the 2 halves with your hands. This method can be quite a bit messier, though.
Continue cutting your jackfruit into 1 ⁄2–2 in (3.8–5.1 cm) wide rounds. Once you’ve cut off the first round, do the same across the entire length of the jackfruit. By the time you finish, you should have around a half dozen jackfruit rounds. A ripe jackfruit should have little to no sap inside. To determine if a jackfruit is ripe, look for a yellow color with brown spots and feel for a soft exterior. A jackfruit that’s hard will need some more time to ripen.
Cut the white core out of each jackfruit round. When you look at the inside of each of the rounds you cut, you’ll see a bunch of yellow bits surrounding a white core. These yellow pods are the edible part of the jackfruit. Use your knife to cut into the round where the white core borders the yellowish interior of the fruit. Then, carefully cut around the inedible white core to remove it.
Separate the yellow pods from the white pulp. To do this, stretch the rounds flat on your cutting board with the fruit side up. Use your fingers, and your knife if you need it, to pull each pod away from the white pulp. To get the yellow pods out of the end pieces, flip the pieces inside out. You can throw the white pulp and the fruit’s skin into the trash once you separate the yellow pods from them.
Open the yellow pods with your fingers to remove the seeds. Each pod you separated from the white pulp will have a seed inside. When you open a yellow pod with your fingers, take out the seed’s covering as well as the seed itself. The seed coverings aren’t edible so you can throw them away. Put the cleaned-out yellow pods in a large bowl. Jackfruit seeds are edible if you roast or boil them, so put them in another bowl if you want to keep them.
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