Frozen langka (jackfruit) served sprinkled with brandy or cognac. It doesn’t get any easier and it tastes surprisingly good. It’s langka season in Luzon big time, with mammoth fruit coming off of the trees and reaching the peak of ripeness just about now. As with most tropical fruits, when it rains, it pours, and the volume is often something that overwhelms. But I don’t generally buy bits of a fruit. So the last time I drove by the roadside stands in Batangas (NOT Tagaytay, where you get seriously fleeced), I bargained for a massive langka that was about 3 days from full ripeness. Back home, it was opened when ripe and the immediate question is, what the heck are we going to do with all of this fruit??? One the easiest ways to preserve it but still have a hint of freshness is to bottle it with sugared water and store it in the fridge for up to several weeks. You can add this to halo-halo, turon, ginataan, etc.
The other way to keep so much langka is to freeze it. 
Serve it cold or just slightly thawing but if you want to give it that extra edge, drizzle it with brandy. One of Marketmanila’s regular readers, Apicio, mentioned several times that one of his childhood favorites was fried bananas served with sugar and drizzled with rhum. Then a few weeks ago we were at a friend’s home and for dessert they served frozen langka with brandy… I tried this at home and really liked the results. The combination of intense sometimes overwhelming flavor of langka, tempered by the frozen state of the fruit, combined with the strong flavor of brandy is really a pleasant surprise. Try it the next time you have an abundance of langka fruit!
9 Responses
mmmm. . . we have a langka tree in ilocos and it really bears lots of fruits, we don;t even know what to do with them, so sometimes we give some away. . .I have to try freezing it then ading brandy. . . sounds good. . .
Hi Marketman,
Do you know where i can buy torta paper? You mentioned in your earlier post that we could get it in bakery shops. Is there a specific bakery you can suggest? Thanks! Am trying out your Torta recipe today.;)
I got my torta paper from cook’s exchange in Rockwell, but the last time I checked they were running low. They also have a branch in Mega Mall ground floor and they would have it there. Alternatively, readers posted several bakeshops in Metro Manila under my post on Baking Ingredients 101 (pls. check archives or the search function) and you may want to try some of those…good luck and let me know if they turn out okay. I am in Cebu at the moment and just ate some torta last night that was flavored with anise seed. It was nice, though I like the wicked yellow and rich version I did in a recipe a few weeks ago and posted on this site…
Thanks, Marketman!
I’ll head over to Cook’s Exchange and get some. I’ll stick to your recipe and tell you how it turns out! Have a safe flight back to Manila!…..
a very timely post. thank you marketman! :D
oh and maybe i can squeeze this someday to my top 10 pinoy desserts. hehe til your next survey. =p
In one of the dinner parties given by our common friend here, I was seated beside a French-Canadian nun who lived in the Philippines almost all her adult life who surprised me with her claim that she adored durian but could not stand the smell of langka which at first hearing I assumed a confusion of one with the other until she went on to say that she, on the other hand, enjoyed its grilled seeds which she considered more flavorful than chataigne (castañas).
Anyway, she chuckled when I recounted to her another elderly French Canadian nun, of a different order, who occaionally ordered empanadas at the shop and on whom I inflicted my idle and so completely rusted French who one dog day afternoon suggested that it must be intensely uncomfortable to be working there on such a hot day to which I replied “m’aam with all the machines and the oven running full blast, c’est l’enfer lá.†Her accutely perceptive reply gave me pause, “M’sieur perhaps you wanted to say, c’est un avant-goût de l’enfer.†She was right, not quite hell but just a foretaste of it.
yes, we freeze langka all the time, as we do other fruits – slices of guyabano, pineapple,suha (pomelo) sections,peeled rambutan and lanzones,star apple, pineapple, etc..in davao, when the fruits are in season,freezing is the way to go. (but never durian, there is never any eft to freeze. freezing intensifies the sweetness, concentrates the sugars, i suspect. the key is to freeze the pieces in one layer in a cookie sheets, and when they’re frozen hard, put them in a ziplock bag. that way, they don’t get a mushy, and you can take out only as many pieces as you want.
I would never have known that you could freeze lanzones or rambutan! Thanks, millet.