Cempedak
Artocarpus integer · Tropical fruit
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Cempedak (Artocarpus integer) is a Southeast Asian tropical fruit, a close cousin of the jackfruit, prized for soft, custardy, deep-golden arils packed with an intense, sweet, almost durian-like perfume. Smaller and more pungent than jackfruit, it is eaten fresh straight from the rind and, most famously, battered and deep-fried as the street snack cempedak goreng across Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.
Picking a good onedrag
Gold, heavy, richly perfumedSlack, weeping, fermenting
Soft and loudEat todayPerfume at its heaviest, arils at their most custardy — the day for cempedak goreng. Two or three days at room temperature is all it has. Seeds boiled or grilled, never raw.
RindDeep brown-gold, the rind thin and taut over the flesh
Tap and squeezeHollow still, giving all over but springing back
SmellLoud and heady, carrying right across the stall
Stalk endStub dry and corky, a little crusted latex left
What you get from one
30%
Edible part
About 450 g of arils from a 1.5 kg fruit — but treat that as approximate: it is borrowed by analogy with jackfruit, whose pulp Morton puts at 25-40% of fruit weight, because no measured cempedak figure exists. The thin rind, the clingy core and the big seeds are the rest, and those seeds are food only once boiled, fried or grilled.
1500 g
Weight each
each one