Next up in the Guardian’s week of roadtesting potato chip alternatives is breadfruit. No one in our original “alternative chip” test had a bad word to say about this head-sized fruit’s chip credentials: “A truly excellent chip” (reddogg100); “Really easy to make and yummy” (Bimshine); and this particularly bold claim: “I challenge you to tell the difference!” (ID9957982). Challenge accepted.
Shopping: I take a smallish looking breadfruit to the stallholder (some are gargantuan) and am instantly asked what I intend to do with it. It would appear that I’ve unwittingly picked up an immature fruit: these are best used for pickling and marinating, and although they can be boiled, they will taste something like an artichoke. No good for what I’m after. The ideal breadfruit for chip-making is mature, and therefore bigger, but still firm. When it’s like this, it can be used much like a potato; any riper and it becomes fodder for cakes, pies and baby puree.
But it’s still not that simple – breadfruit has a great many stages of ripeness. You can’t tell exactly how ripe a breadfruit is from the outside, so the vendor uses a knife to hack out a small square and reveal all. Opinions are divided in the shop; while one lady thinks my breadfruit should still have a tinge of green to the white flesh beneath its reptilian skin, another thinks I want the fruit whose white flesh is turning yellow. I buy half of each – buying pieces of breadfruit seems to be common practice.
Method: It’s not an entirely pleasant-smelling fruit. While I read several descriptions of its “floral aroma” online, they fail to mention that it actually verges on sickly pungency. It’s a musky, bodily kind of odour. So I work fast. The breadfruit is covered in a gummy white sap, so peeling it is a sticky affair, but once you get over that, it’s a joy – much like a potato, it has the sort of skin that peelers glide through.
Once I’ve cut the fruit into quarters, I remove the stalk or inner core, which reveals pot-holed flesh below, very different from the dense, even flesh that surrounds it. It looks like natural sponge, and I’m not entirely sure I should keep it; but Sam Choy does, so I do too.
There are several recipes for breadfruit chips out there, but none mention parboiling. I reckon my chips – half from the greener breadfruit and half from the yellower – all feel rubbery enough to survive a blanch, so I settle for that. After a five-minute dip in salted boiling water, the differences between the two types of breadfruit become much more pronounced: the green is just too raw and has stayed white, whereas the yellow has become more so. In oil it becomes even clearer that the greener of the two isn’t the right fruit for the job – the chips are unconvincing in colour (green is replaced by dull grey), texture and flavour. The yellow aren’t perfect either – they seem reluctant to take on any additional colour from the oil, instead retaining an even, pale yellow hue. After letting one batch go positively leathery, I take the next ones out in time.
Verdict: This is a decent-enough chip. It looks the part in terms of its shape, and flavour-wise it’s certainly quite potatoey. All traces of that fruity aroma seem to have been stamped out by the cooking process, and the floury centre recalls the texture of, well, potato. But I just can’t see why you’d bother with this if you could get your hands on an actual potato. I feel like I must be missing something – if anyone has any tips, I’m all ears.
Score: 2/5
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