In Bangalore, one is lucky – one can buy just a few pieces of ripe, juicy jackfruit from roadside fruit-stalls. This is not a luxury people have in many other places, where one has to settle for buying a whole jackfruit usually to the tune of 10-15kg. One ends up with like a 100 or so pods of jackfruit and to the uninitiated, this can seem like a nightmare. It did seem like one to me when due a twist in life I ended up with a 10 kilo jackfruit, and I was feeling fed up even before starting to eat it, just by thinking of all the days I’d have to spend eating jackfruit in various forms.

What saved me was this – also called chakka varati, jackfruit halva, jam or whatever you might want to call it. Such a flexible item, this can be used in a variety of dishes and extends the life of the jackfruit so that you’re not pressured to finish everything up within a couple of days. This is pretty amazing to eat even as it is, even more so when it is freshly cooked.

Ingredients

5 cups ripe jackfruit pods, deseeded
1 cup grated jaggery
4 tbsp ghee

Instructions

• Grind the jackfruit into a coarse paste.
• Heat ghee in a pan and when hot, add the ground jackfruit.
• When the jackfruit is almost cooked, add the jaggery. Traditionally, the jaggery is heated with a tablespoon of water until it melts, and then strained and poured into the paste so that any impurities in the jaggery and filtered out. This can also be done.
• Cook until a jam-like consistency is reached and it leaves the sides of the pan easily.
• When refrigerated, It will keep easily for a month.

Note: You might want to vary the quantity of the jaggery depending on the sweetness of the jackfruit.