Kolo

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

Boiled, baked, fried, steamed, even poached, this fruit is one ball of inimitable goodness – starchy, with faint fruity notes, soft, its sweetness building in one’s mouth in the chewing. And it is one of those delights that only become even more delightful when paired with other things like say, muscovado sugar or fresh coconut milk.

It is called ‘kolo’ locally and I understand, ‘rimas’ in other regions of the country. It is called breadfruit in English.

Kolo is starting to appear in our wet markets these days, and they come cheap – P20 per piece. Its fruiting season is still weeks away and I can only imagine how much cheaper this will go when the fruits come rolling in baskets and even crates.

Going by the law of supply and demand, it is apparent the fruit does not exactly attract that many buyers, otherwise, its price must shoot up.

This is both sad and welcome news. This means one can have as much breadfruit as one can have without burning a hole in one’s pockets. But this also sad because breadfruit, to my mind, should make for one good export product.

Yes, it should earn dollars for us. Given its culinary versatility, and the hundred delicious ways it can be used for, kolo should be up there among our exports.

The most popular way of doing breadfruit is boiling it. It is peeled and sliced into triangles and boiled, sometimes with little salt if you mean to eat it as is. Tasty as this is, some people further dip it in salt.

Many, however, eat it with sugar, with muscovado as the preferred kind, the better to play with the flavors and textures of the fruit. There are those who accord it the royal treatment – after dusting it with sugar, they drizzle fresh coconut milk on it.

Still, there are those who prepare kolo like it was banana cue – they sugar it while still frying in hot oil so that it ends up covered in brown, glistening candy. This one is also heavenly, especially when dipped in fresh, first-squeeze coconut milk.

Candied kolo is done by cooking slices of it in sugared water and cooking this until the water evaporates, which is really the traditional way the average Negrense candies the fruits of his garden, whether it’s camote, coconut, jackfruit and even pineapple.

One version of the breadfruit candy is the one where it is mashed to a mushy paste. This is the one that people use for stuffing breadfruit pie.

It can also be sliced very thinly and fried to a crisp for kolo chips, and this can either with salted or sugared. Either way, the breadfruit has a versatile and outstanding taste that should do well in a world where natural snacks are slowly becoming a need.

Given this versatility, it is a wonder why until now, kolo has not moved out of our humble kitchens and dining tables and perhaps invade the restaurant circuit, and yes, the global markets.

As is the case of the things nature has blessed us with abundance, like camote for example, we seem to have taken kolo and its culinary goodness for granted. But I hope someday soon, we will all realize that it is in these ordinary crops, the ones that we produce in abundance and are available so cheaply that the future of our agriculture and even food tourism lies. After all, these are the crops and the products we can make out of them that we can sell competitively in a world that has become intensely competitive already. In other words, let us bring out and give the world the crops and flavors that only we can make the best of.

Kolo is one of them.*

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