Is it skill, gift or mystic power to know when a fruit is truly, perfectly ripe? Robynne Maii, a chef and co-owner of Fête in Honolulu, remembers her grandmother’s keeping vigil over a bunch of bananas, checking them every two hours. The banana appears obliging, the green ebbing from the peel and the yellow growing brighter, like a sun in bloom. Then — blink! — the swift collapse into freckled mush begins. Like bankruptcy in a Hemingway novel, ripening happens gradually and then suddenly.
Not all fruits are so mercurial. Apples soldier on for weeks in the fridge, loyally crisp. But an avocado or a peach is unmoved by human need and insistent on its own understanding of time. It must be squeezed (gently) and only the most patient and committed can catch it at just the moment its guard comes down.
The fruit that eluded Maii for years was ‘ulu, breadfruit in Hawaiian: hefty as a melon and green and bumpy all over, like a baby dragon waiting to unfurl. ‘Ulu is her birthright, a staple of her native Hawaiian ancestors and a canoe crop brought by the Polynesian voyagers who started settling the islands in the fourth century. Yet she rarely ate it as a child in the 1970s and 1980s in eastern Oahu. Hawaiian customs and food were still marginalized then, a legacy of colonialism.
When Maii moved back to the islands in 2014, after finishing graduate school and working in New York, she was surprised to find ‘ulu on menus everywhere, as part of a movement to take back the ‘aina (land). Some chefs compared it with a plantain, others with a potato. It was starchy, vitamin-rich and resilient, championed as an answer to world hunger. But it typically ended up on plates in the form of fries or chips.
In what she looks back on as an act of hubris, she decided, despite her inexperience with the ingredient, to make ‘ulu sorbet at Fête, which she opened with her husband, Chuck Bussler, in 2016. Batch after batch yielded a turgid mess. “The universe was teaching me a lesson,” she says. She admitted defeat.
A warm and vital dish so good that it made me laugh.
But the universe gave her a second chance. A few years ago, she saw ‘ulu at a local farm and took it back to the restaurant. “Not necessarily to put it on the menu,” she says, “but to try again. To embrace it personally.” “Oh, that’s really good ‘ulu,” one of her cooks, from Micronesia, told her. And it was time, the cook said: The ‘ulu was ready.
Breadfruit is grown in tropical zones, and Maii’s research led her toward Indian food. She liked the wordplay between ‘ulu and aloo, Hindi for potato. So she popped cumin and mustard seeds in olive oil and stirred in turmeric, then crushed the ‘ulu with the spiced oil, ginger and salt, adding lemon for brightness.
When I had it at Fête last year, it was everything I’d ever wanted in Thanksgiving mashed potatoes, warm and vital, so good it made me laugh. Around the ‘ulu was a chutney of black sesame seeds and lilikoi (passion fruit), tart and musky. And over it all was a heap of crisped okra, tripling the dish’s height. (For home cooks, store-bought fried shallots are a fine substitute.)
If you’re not so lucky as to live on the islands, you may find breadfruit in Caribbean or Southeast Asian groceries. Or you can order it frozen from the Hawai‘i ‘Ulu Cooperative — which saves you the difficulty of puzzling out when it’s ripe. Even Maii doesn’t feel that she has that quite down. Taken too soon, ‘ulu resists, more chewy than fluffy; too late, and the flesh turns to custard. To Maii, it’s a humbling reminder of the most important rule in the kitchen, and in life: “Pay attention.”
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