Smoked Ulu (Breadfruit)

ʻUlu is a canoe crop — carried across the Pacific in voyaging canoes and planted wherever Polynesians landed. In Hawaiian tradition the god Kū buried himself in the ground during a famine and rose again as the ʻulu tree so his family could eat. It has fed these islands for centuries, and it is still the most underrated starch in America. Traditionally it goes whole into the imu or straight into the coals, skin and all, and comes out steamed in its own hide.

Two things decide whether this works. First, ripeness: you want a mature fruit that has just started to give under thumb pressure and still weeps milky latex when scratched. Rock-hard is a potato with no flavor; fully soft is dessert. Second, the latex — oil your hands and your knife before you touch it or you'll be scrubbing glue off both for an hour. At 300-325°F over kiawe the skin blisters and blackens into a shell, the flesh inside goes to something between a baked potato and custard, and the smoke gets in through the stem end and the score lines. Nowhere else.

Ingredients

• 1 mature ʻulu (breadfruit), 3-5 lbs, firm with a slight give and still weeping milky latex
• Neutral oil — for your hands, your knife, and the skin
• 3 Tbsp coconut oil or butter, melted
• Coarse Hawaiian sea salt (paʻakai) or kosher salt
• 1/2 cup thick coconut cream, warmed
• Cracked black pepper
• Optional: chili pepper water, or 2 Tbsp shoyu whisked into the coconut cream
• Optional finish: sliced green onion and toasted coconut flakes

Cook Sequence

1. Fire for 300-325°F indirect. Two kiawe chunks on at the start, two more held back for the halfway mark — a 90-minute cook wants smoke in stages, not all at once.
2. Oil your hands and knife. Cut out the stem, then score the skin in four shallow lines from stem to blossom end, about 1/4 inch deep. That's a vent, not a butterfly — cut deeper and the flesh dries out.
3. Rub the whole fruit with oil and set it directly on the grate, stem end down, over the indirect side. Lid closed.
4. Rotate a quarter turn every 20 minutes. The skin goes from green to bronze to blistered black — that's correct and it's not the food, it's the jacket.
5. Probe at 60 minutes. Done is 200-205°F at the core and a thermometer that slides in like it's going through cold butter, with no resistance at the center. Usually 75-90 minutes.
6. Rest 10 minutes, then split it stem to blossom. Cut out the fibrous core and the seed cavity and discard.
7. Scoop the flesh into a bowl and fold in melted coconut oil, warm coconut cream, salt and pepper — mash it rough, leave lumps. Or leave it in wedges, brush with the coconut oil, and put the cut faces back over direct heat for 2 minutes to take char. Both are right; the wedges reheat better.

Round Out the Plate

• Grilled Pineapple Salsa — acid and char to cut a rich, creamy starch
• Asian Slaw — crunch against soft ʻulu — the texture contrast this dish needs