Cheera Chakkakuru Avial – Amaranth Jackfruit Seeds in a Spiced Coconut Sauce

Amaranth leaves and stems and Jackfruit seeds come together with a mildly spiced coconut-cumin-chillie sauce in this Cheera Chakkakuru Avial, a great vegetable side for rice. It is Vegan and Gluten Free.

Jackfruit is the in-vegetable / fruit now. It is the ultimate vegan alternative to meat, maybe because of the texture it gets when it is cooked or something else. I am not so sure.  To me, this is a fruit, that I fondly remember from the time I was a little girl, growing up in a small city in Kerala. We had a jackfruit tree in our backyard along with mangoes and papayas and I still remember that strong vine of black pepper that climbed along the trunk of this jackfruit tree. Appa and I would go pick up green pepper corns, that are later dried to be the black pepper corns. There are a few different kinds of Jackfruit tree and I don’t quite remember which one we had. All I remember was that we never got really big fruits from it and we always took out the small young fruits that were not so ripe yet, called idichakka, and made curries with it.

Come summer, we would buy big jackfruits from the market – the really big ones were about 3 feet high and equally fat too. Amma and appa would sit down with newspapers spread across the floor and start the laborious process of cutting up the jackfruit. You have to be very careful with it, as the gum/resin/latex that comes out of it is a sticky nasty thing that gets on to everything and is really painful to clean it off. They would cut open the jackfruit, take out the flash from the core of the fruit, remove the seeds from the flesh and separate the whole entire fruit. The ripe flesh was eaten as it is. It sort of has a honey-banana-pineapple taste to it. The seeds were carefully removed from the thin shell covering it and washed and let to dry.

If the jackfruit was not ripe, the raw fleshy part was used to make curries or was sliced up and made into jackfruit chips – whether it went into curries or chips depended on the type of jackfruit it was. But basically, come summer, there was a ton of lot of goodies made in the house with jackfruit and we loved each and every bit of it!

This Avial / curry is made with the jackfruit seeds. I buy them here frozen from the Indian store. They are already cleaned and ready to be cooked. So all I need to do is defrost them, cook them and eat. I have used the Amaranth leaves and stems in this curry, whereas, it is typically made with just the stems mostly. I think it was devised as a leftover curry of sorts, when the stems of amaranth and some extra jackfruit seeds were leftover after making other delicious things. Nevertheless, this is one delicious curry and a must try!

Cheera Chakkakuru Avial – The Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 cup jackfruit seeds
• 1/4 cup raw mango pieces
• 1 bunch amaranth, leaves and stems
• 1/2 tsp turmeric powder
• 1/2 cup grated coconut
• 1 tsp cumin
• 3 dried red chillies
• salt, to taste
• 1 tbsp coconut oil
• 8-10 curry leaves

Method:

Chop the amaranth leaves and stems roughly and cut the jackfruit seeds in half, lengthwise. Cook the jackfruit seeds and raw mango pieces in water with turmeric powder for 10 – 15 mins till they are a little soft to touch. Don’t let them get too cooked and mushy. Keep checking in between. It should be a little difficult to mush it.

Drain most of the water and leave just a little for the amaranth leaves to cook in. Add the leaves and stems and let them wilt and soften.

Now grind the coconut, cumin and dried red chillies with a little water to a very smooth paste and add to the amaranth and jackfruit seeds. Add salt and mix it all in and remove from heat. Top with coconut oil and curry leaves.

Here is another Avial recipe from the archives and more Kerala Sadya Recipes.