A Langka Seed Recipe and Jesper Ulvelius
The right food always comes at the right time. Reliance on out-of-season foods makes the gastronomic year an endlessly boring repetition. (Roy Andres de Groot)
Nobody, to my knowledge, really bothers to create the agricultural conditions to produce langka year-round, so both the fruit and the seeds are a fairly rare treat. Since the dauntingly large fruit came into view this year, I've been daydreaming about using its seeds in different ways.
Langka seeds taste distinctly carby and generally awesome by themselves, or dipped in a bit of salt or toyo. While I greatly enjoy just snacking on the boiled seeds, I had recently been thinking quite obsessively of turning them into some kind of pate or paste.
So anyway, I've finally settled in after a long busy period of travel and dinners and whatnot, so it was a good time to actually try something. Yesterday morning, I saw that Tita Janice had candied the last meat of the recent langka we got from Tito Gerry's miraculously prolific tree.
Unfortunately, the seeds we had put away before had gotten moldy all over and were thus now only good for planting (sayang, bwisit). As a result, I only had today's paltry batch to work with. I was planning to make some creame sauce for colored Greek pasta with veggies, but I got too lazy to do the noodles. Who needs noodles when the household has a big pot of rice boiling?
So I ended up doing sitao (string beans) and carrots. They were sauteed in garlic and onions, topped with lemon basil, and then with the sauce below.
Langka Seed Paste Super Sauce
3 handfuls of boiled langka (jackfruit) seeds, peeled
3 big handfuls of niyog (grated coconut)
4 cloves of garlic, mashed
½ teaspoon tanglad (lemongrass stalk), minced
½ teaspoon ginger, minced
2 tablespoons of soy sauce or liquid aminos
1. Mash the langka seeds into a paste. Set aside.
2. Put about half a cup of water in the niyog and squeeze coconut milk out. Set this aside.
3. Put about 1 tablespoon of oil into a saucepan and saute the garlic until it becomes fragrant. Add the mashed langka seeds and stir well. Add just enough water so it becomes creamy when well-stirred.
4. Stir in coconut milk, tanglad, and ginger. Stir in soy sauce.
5. Stir the whole thing until it becomes saucy. Taste it and adjust to your preference. Pour over vegetables. If you wish, you can top the veggies with basil leaves or whatever.
Serve this hot. You might eventually wish you made more of it.
I hope this gets you thinking about what else to do with the wonderful seeds. I guess you can chop them up and put them in baked goods too. In any case, share your recipes!
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In other news, Capricious #4 has been part of my bathroom life for quite a long time now (together with O'Rourke, Laugh, Archie and sometimes attempting to do Gino's Sudoku).
There is one set of photos that always cracks me up, and if you visit photog Jesper Ulvelius' website and go to the "Jesper" series, you'll see what I've been snickering about in my tiled paradise for the past few I dunno how many months.