Make These Healthy Jackfruit Carnitas You Are Guaranteed To Crave

Make These Healthy Jackfruit Carnitas You Are Guaranteed To Crave

Hipster taco night is a time to settle into the kitchen and get our slow cook on. Our absolute favourite recipe is our healthy jackfruit carnitas. We use the term carnitas with a bit of creative license, after all, carnitas translates to “little meat”, and this recipe is actually vegan friendly. Traditionally, carnitas calls for a marbled cut of pork. For our healthy jackfruit carnitas, we replace the pork with unripe jackfruit. When making carnitas, the meat is slow cooked so that it braises until tender, cooks down and then it is allowed to essentially fry in its own fat. As jackfruit does not have this inherent fat, you have to add it to the mixture. As this is a vegan friendly recipe, this pork fat is replaced with coconut oil. 

Creativity is common in Mexican cuisine, this creativity is often seen in the replacing of ingredients to reflect an area, a style, or availability. The real key is not rushing the cooking process to allow the dish to develop a depth of flavour that makes Mexican cuisine so unique. It is about using seemingly simple ingredients to their greatest potential. Anthony Bourdain described Mexican cuisine as “deeply complex, refined, subtle, and sophisticated”. It is a cuisine that has been built and evolved over a long history of influence from cultures including Mayan, Aztec, and Spain, along with Caribbean, French, West Africa, and Portugese. 

Why Jackfruit for our healthy carnitas?

We use young jackfruit for our healthy jackfruit carnitas due to the fantastic cooking and health benefits, as well as its sustainability. Jackfruit is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world. It is an extremely hardy plant, and produces significant amounts of fruit a year. In fact, one tree can produce up to 200 jackfruit in a year! This makes jackfruit a very sustainable food with the possibility to address many growing food concerns worldwide. Jackfruit is high in vitamins and nutrients. Some of the health benefits attributed to it, including being good for digestion, immunity, heart health, bone health, skin health, anti-aging, and boosting energy. Even if it is not a miracle fruit, it is delicious, so that is always a win in our book.

Although here at the Hipster House we are not a vegan, we are all about variety and sustainability. We go in for reducetarianism, focusing on quality and sourcing. More about this in future posts. We love to celebrate an ingredient for what it can bring to a dish. Jackfruit is a favourite in the Hipster House for its texture and ability to absorb flavours in cooking. This means you can really maximise the slow cooked spice elements of our healthy jackfruit carnitas recipe.

combine all the ingredients in cook pot

Healthy Jackfruit Carnitas

You will need the following ingredients:
  • 2 tins drained Jackfruit (young green tinned in water or brine) (equivalent of 1.25 lbs or just under 600 g)

  • 1 cup water 

  • 1 medium white onion

  • ½ orange chunked

  • 3 tbsp coconut oil (hold back ½ tbsp for baking portion of recipe)

  • 6 garlic cloves 

  • 3 bay leaves

  • 2 tbsp coconut milk

  • ½ tsp maple syrup (or honey)

  • 2 tsp Mexican oregano (*if you don’t have Mexican oregano, you can use the Mediterranean variety with a bit of marjoram mixed in)

  • 2 tsp sea salt

And the following equipment:
  • Knife

  • Cutting board

  • Cooking pot

  • Measuring cups

  • Measuring spoons

  • Mixing spoon

  • Casserole dish

Simple flavours are maximised in Mexican cooking

Ok, now let’s get cooking!

  • Drain and rinse canned jackfruit

  • Dice the onion, you don’t have to be too particular as this will break down during cooking

  • Cut the orange in half

  • Lightly crush and peel garlic cloves. Hip-tip: use the side of the knife to slightly crush the garlic, this will make the cloves easier to peel. 

  • Add jackfruit, onion, orange, and garlic to large pot

  • Pour over 1 cup of water

  • Drop 3 bay leaves into the pot along with the 2.5 tbsp of coconut oil

  • Add 2 tbsp of coconut milk and ½ tsp of maple syrup

  • Sprinkle over 2 tsp of Mexican oregano and 2 tsp of sea salt

  • Give the mixture a stir and place onto stove top

  • Start on high heat to bring the liquid to a boil

  • Once liquid is boiling turn the temperature down to bring the mixture to a simmer

  • Mix regularly and keep an eye on the liquid

  • The mixture should cook for around 1 ½ hours, until the liquid is cooked off. 

  • Add more water if the liquid is cooking off too fast, but you do not want any liquid remaining at the end

  • Preheat your oven to 230 C and slightly heat the casserole dish

  • Remove the pieces of orange and the bay leaves from the mixture, make sure to keep an eye out as the bay leaves may have broken during cooking.

  • Transfer your jackfruit mixture to your heated casserole dish and dot the top with the remaining 1/2 tbsp of coconut oil. 

  • Bake the carnitas in the oven for 20-30 minutes until the top is crispy.

  • Now is a great time to get your sides ready, such as a fresh salsa or creamy guacamole

  • Once the top of your healthy jackfruit carnitas has crisped, you are ready to serve it up and enjoy.

bake jackfruit carnitas until crispy

We recommend enjoying your healthy jackfruit carnitas on traditional corn tortillas with a simple pico de gallo for freshness. If you like a bit of texture variety, add in some black beans and guacamole. For a twist on your basic guacamole, check out our recipe for Smashed Apple Guacamole.

*Chef’s note on substituting for Mexican oregano. Mexican oregano is more citrusy than its Mediterranean counterpart. To mimic this flavour, use a half and half blend of oregano and marjoram, which will add that citrusy flavour to balance the oregano.



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