Jackstrami

Welcome to another exciting episode of " What's That Sandwich?"

This sandwich is corned, smoked jackfruit, which I call Jackstrami, served with sauerkraut, melted mozzarella cheese, and "secret sauce" containing chipotle mayonnaise, plain kefir,relish, regular mayo, and a drop of dijon mustard, on rye bread.

Say what? I've been reading and experimenting with jackfruit, as a meat substitute. I'm not a vegetarian, but I like vegetarian food. I'm not convinced one way or the other whether meat is healthy for humans or not, but I can tell you one thing: It's not healthy for animals. I feel physically good after eating meat, but I don't like contributing to fatten the profits of evil meat producers, who don't think of the animals as sentient beings, but rather just contributors to the bottom line.

Anyway, jackfruit. It's a thing. Vegetarian restaurants in various places are selling jackfruit tacos, jackfruit carnitas, and jackfruit pulled pork. I've made them. Online reviews of these recipes say they taste just like the real thing. But they don't. Jackfruit tastes like nothing.  The tofu of the fruit world. A few days ago I ran into a recipe for a jackfruit " corned beef", and it intrigued me. Corned beef is "corned" in liquid and spices. I decided to "pastramicize" it by smoking it after corning it. Because jackfruit tastes like nothing, and I was trying to imbue it with as much flavor as possible.

Evidently it's the young jackfruit that is used as a meat substitute, and is readily available at Asian supermarkets. It comes in cans. A 20 oz can of jackfruit cost me $1.29, and I got three sandwiches out of it, so it's not expensive. It has a lot of nutrition, but not much protein. People who are accustomed to eating lots of protein at every meal will have to find a way to accommodate that: Have some bean soup with it, or a tub of tofu, or fry up a few slices of bacon with it.

Anyway, this is not a vegan sandwich. I'm sure it can be easily adapted in that direction, but I have to piss everybody off, meat eaters and vegetarians alike. Open the can, drain it, and rinse off the jackfruit. The jackfruit pieces are triangular shaped, and about five inches long. Dump them into a crock pot. Add 1/4 cup of pickling spice( maybe even better is to find something specifically called corned beef spices) add a cup of water, 1/4 cup of red wine or apple cider vinegar, and a beet. The beet is used for the purposes of making the jackfruit appear more meat like. without it, it's pale. Pretty unappetizing looking. Cook it on low for about four hours. If you're more organized than I am,

you can tie up the pickling spices in a sachet, but I just dumped them in, and scraped them off the jackfruit corning liquid when it was done. After four hours, I picked the jackfruit out of the slow cooker, scraped them off, and added some salt and black pepper to them. Then I got out some aluminum foil which I rubbed oil on, and wrapped the jackfruit in it, keeping it in a single layer. I poked some holes in the foil, and added the foil wrapped jackfruit to my electric smoker, in which I used hickory chips. They smoked for 2 1/2 hours. Here's what it looked like after coming out of the smoker. I then sliced each hunk of jackfruit fairly thinly.                                                                                                                                  

         

This is it sliced up. Kind of looks a bit like Chinese BBQ pork slices, and kind of stringy like corned beef.  Then I got out the rye bread, melting the cheese on one piece. On top of the melted cheese, I added heated sauerkraut. On the other piece, I spread the secret sauce and topped it with the sliced, corned, smoked jackfruit.

How'd it turn out? Way better than I expected. Corning and smoking the jackfruit transformed it. It didn't exactly taste like meat, but it suggested it somehow. I may not make jackfruit pulled pork again, but I'm definitely going to do the Jackstrami again. Winner.