Jackfruit Pibil Tacos
It's now a pretty good bet that if I'm smoking up some pork butt, there's going to be a jackfruit equivalent to go with it. I've done this with traditional barbecue and a mojo marinade to much success, and since my guests seem to always enjoy it and I haven't hit any road bumps yet, I figure why stop a good thing. So when I was making the Mayan roast pork dish of cochinita pibil for my meat eating guests, I doubled up on the marinade and used half on jackfruit so there wasn't a single person who couldn't enjoy these delicious tacos.
In doing research on Yucatán cuisine, it seemed to be that two ingredients reigned supreme in many dishes—sour oranges and/or achiote. These both served as the foundation of the jackfruit pibil marinade, and if you can't find sour oranges, don't fret because an equal mixture of lime, orange, and grapefruit juice will give you a close enough equivalent that the final dish will more-or-less taste the same.
Garlic and spices also played heavily in this marinade and I toasted them both in a cast iron skillet first. For the garlic, I toasted unpeeled cloves until they started to blacken in spots. Then after I removed those from the pan and let them cool, I toasted oregano, peppercorns, cumin, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves until those were aromatic.
Once the spices were done I ground them finely in the spice grinder and added them to a blender jar with the sour orange juice and achiote paste. Next went in the now peeled garlic along with cider vinegar. The entire thing got a whirl until smooth and the marinade was all set to go.
When shopping for jackfruit you want to look for young/green jackfruit which comes canned in either water, brine, or syrup. Water is my first choice since it's the most neutral in flavor, but brine will just mean the jackfruit might be a little saltier. Syrup introduces sweetness, so you want to avoid that for this recipe. Canned jackfruit is common in Asian markets, and after picking up the cans at one, my prep merely involved draining the fruit, placing the chunks into a large Ziploc bag, and then adding in the marinade.
I tossed the bag to gently coat all the jackfruit in the marinade and let that sit in the fridge overnight, but just an hour or so should do fine for this recipe too. Traditional cochinita pibil is roasted in banana leaves, which gives it a distinct aroma and taste, so it seemed right to do the same with the jackfruit. Banana leaves are also something you can pick up at most Asian groceries, and I only needed four to make a packet large enough to hold my six cans of jackfruit.
I tied the banana leaves closed with butcher twine and placed the entire thing in a foil tray since inevitably sauce was going to leak out of the banana leaves. I chose to roast the jackfruit in the smoker since I had it going for the cochinita pibil already, but to be honest, there isn't a ton of advantage of the smoker, so a 300°F oven would work just as well. My goal was to cook the jackfruit until heated throughout and tender enough that it shreds easily. This is a process that takes many, many hours with a pork butt, but jackfruit only takes an hour or so.
I let this cook for an hour and half and once I took the tray out of the smoker and opened it up, the jackfruit was plenty hot. I then used my Bear Paws to quickly shred the jackfruit, but two forks or your hands will do the job too, just a little slower.
This was the first day I actually made labels for my food because when I set the jackfruit next to the cochinita pibil, it was easy to confuse the vegetarian and meat versions by looks alone. By taste, there's obviously more of a difference, but the jackfruit version did have the hallmark earthy, fruity, and acidic flavor that made it recognizably similar to cochinita pibil. Those were the same flavors that made it such a killer taco filling, especially when paired with some traditional accompaniments like sour orange pickled red onions and the super fiery habanero salsa chile tamulado. It's always nice when I can offer up meat eaters and vegetarians almost the same experience, which is the main reason there's likely going to be even more smoked jackfruit recipes to come, I just hope they'll all be as great as this jackfruit pibil was!
