Billie Lee Dalton, age 12, of Louisville, for the question:
What is breadfruit?
Our daily bread is made mostly from wheat. But the daily bread for the people of Malaya comes from the breadfruit tree. The original home of this reliable tree is thought to be the Malayan Archipelago. But it spread before the dawn of history to many tropical isles of the South Pacific. For the people of these regions it has provided a staple food for untold ages.
The breadfruit tree itself is a beauty anywhere from 40 to 60 feet tall. Its trunk is strong and straight the boughs do not begin until 20 to 30 feet above the ground. There they spread into a parasol of largo darks glossy leaves green and shady all year round, long the glossy leaves there are always few catkins, always a few floral buds and always a few of the big oval objects know as breadfruit.
These breadfruit are from four to eight inches wide and covered with pimply rind. The color changes from green to brown. Inside, the rind is stuffed with a starchy pulp. In some varieties of breadfruit, there is a nest of chestnut type seeds in the pulp. The most popular varieties are seedless. New trees from these seedless breadfruit are started from root cuttings.
The starchy pulp provides the food which gives the breadfruit its name. Are you dreaming of a lazy island paradise where you can walk out, pick a loaf from a tree, a tree whose loaves ripen every week of the year? Wells things are never so easy as we dream them. You could not pick a loaf of breadfruit and slice a sandwich. For this tree loaf cannot be eaten raw.
The people of the South Seas have several methods of cooking the breadfruit. The tree loaves are picked before they are quite ripe and a whole lot of them may be roasted together in a pit. First comes a layer of hot stones, then a layer of breadfruit with perhaps a bed of leaves from the tree. Next comes more hot stones and then another layer of breadfruit and leaves.
The roasted breadfruit is good to eat with no further preparation. The starchy center has become mealy and its flavor is something between bread and sweet potatoes. Many people, however, prefer to perk up this bland flavor with salt, butter or gravy.
Another method of cooking the breadfruit is to bake it in an oven or boil it in a pot of hot water. The center will be bland, mealy and rich in starch.
Sometimes the breadfruit is sliced into strips before cooking. The slices may be dried in the sun or a slow oven. They may then be pounded to make flour or put into boiling fat to make French fried breadfruit.
The breadfruit of the Pacific Islands attracted the, explorer Onptain Cook, Ho wanted to transplant cuttings to the Test Indies and the sailing ship Bounty was commissioned for the fob. Under the store Captain Bligh, the ship gathered cuttings from Tahiti in 1787. Put those cuttings never got anywhere. For in 1789, the Master's Mate, Fletcher Christian and the crew robollcd and the ill‑fated voyage for breadfruit ended in mutiny on the Bounty.